Blood of Victory

POLANYI’S ORCHESTRA

In Bulgaria, they called Russia Uncle Ivan and he was their favorite uncle, because he’d rescued their Slavic souls from the Ottoman devil in 1878 and they never forgot it. So the French journalist who boarded the Danube ferry in Roumania became, when he reached the Bulgarian port of Ruse, the Russian emigre I. A. Serebin, who, glancing back toward the far shore with evident distaste, earned from the customs officer a fraternal slap on the back.

They were pleased to see him, at the border post, where they’d had a steady stream of Roumanian refugees all night long and didn’t really know what to do with them. “A writer?” the officer said, looking at his papers. “You ought to go up to Svistov.” Where, it was explained, they had a museum dedicated to the memory of the assassinated poet Konstantinov, his pierced heart exhibited in a glass box. “It will inspire you,” they said.

There was not a room to be had anywhere in Ruse but, for one of Uncle Ivan’s wandering lads, a nearby hotel had a bowl of soup, an army blanket, and a couch in the lobby where he was guarded the long night through by the hotel dog. In the morning, he wired Helikon Trading and received his answer poste restante by the end of the day. Arriving Central Station Edirne 17:25 on 24 January.

Serebin spent a long day with the Bulgarian railroad, crossed into Turkey, walked around Edirne for an hour, and entered the railway station waiting room just after five, where Polanyi’s assistant Ibrahim found him and took him off to a caravansary hotel by the Old Mosque.

Polanyi had taken care to make things nice for his returning warrior. There was a crackling blaze in the fireplace, a plate of things on toasted flatbread, a bottle of Polish vodka. Serebin was surprised at the depth of gratitude he felt. “Welcome home,” Polanyi said. “How bad was it?”

Bad enough. Serebin described his time in Bucharest, Polanyi listened carefully and, now and then, took notes. “It’s no surprise,” he said, rising to put a fresh log on the fire. “We thought they would support Antonescu. It’s basic German policy, they’ve certainly said it often enough. ‘Peace and quiet in the raw material zone.’ Stability is what they want, and they couldn’t care less about Roumanian politics, to them it’s comedy, farce. They want the oil and the wheat, forget the ideology. And no Balkan adventures.”

“They are there in force,” Serebin said. “Tanks, armored cars, everything.”

“And more to come, as they get ready to attack Russia.”

“Will they?”

“They will. And soon, likely after the spring floods.”

The prediction wasn’t new. A drift in war conversation since Poland in ’39, and Serebin saw always, when it came up, the same images. A thousand Ukrainian villages, shtetls, peasants, who had no shoes, who, some days, had nothing to eat, nothing. And then the soldiers came, as had Serebin, then the huts and barns burned and the animals died. To Polanyi he could only say, “Poor Russia.”

“Yes,” Polanyi said. “I know. But the divisions are moving east, in Poland, and, soon, in Roumania. Bulgaria will sign up with Hitler-Czar Boris will, at any rate-and he already has Hungary, as much as anyone can ever have it, including the Hungarians. Britain has offered to send troops to Greece, but they’ve refused. For the moment. Right now, they think they can chase the Italian army all the way back to Rome, but Hitler won’t allow it. By spring, you’ll see the swastika flying over the Acropolis, and southern Europe will be essentially secured.”

“Except for Yugoslavia.”

“A thorn in his side. And the Serbs never go quietly.”

“Will he invade?”

“Well, he won’t sneak in. Coup d’etat, more likely.”

Polanyi settled back in his chair and took some time to light a cigar. “So, Ilya,” he said, “tell me how you propose to halt oil shipments to Germany and bring an end to this wretched war.” The edge of amusement in his voice wasn’t subtle-caught in a hopeless cause that couldn’t be abandoned, one had better be amused.

“Blow up the river,” Serebin said. “Or block it.”

“How?”

“Not like the British in '39.”

“Meaning?”

“No commandos.”

“What then?”

“Plausible accident.”

“Ten days. Maybe two weeks.”

“Then another.”

Polanyi sighed. “Yes, if you can’t attack the fields, you have only the transport system. We’re all agreed about that.”

“Marrano?”

“Everybody. My last two people should be out by the end of the week.”

“How many were there?”

“Ilya, please.”

Serebin laughed. “Sorry.” Then he said, “It doesn’t have to be forever, does it?”

“No. We don’t have to win, we have to play. Slow him down-an inevitable problem with supply. Make him think about timing, with his Russian invasion, wait for the Americans, or maybe he’ll choke on a cauliflower.”

For a moment, they watched the fire.

“Who could ever have imagined,” Polanyi said, “that the man who came to burn down the world would be a vegetarian.”

“We’ll need people in Roumania,” Serebin said.

“We have them. Just barely, but we do.”

Serebin didn’t believe it.

“We didn’t fail in Bucharest,” Polanyi said. “Not quite.”

Lunch was ordered in the room. Polanyi and Serebin went round and round, what and how and when and back to what. No final conclusion-the gods on Olympus would have to be consulted-but plenty of false trails pursued to the end. What Can’t Be Done, that dreary epic, written this day in the form of notes by Count Janos Polanyi. Eventually, for Serebin, an assignment in Paris, thank God, and, finally, parting gifts. Balkan Sobranies, sugared plums from Balabukhi-just as he’d given Tamara Petrovna-and, for the long ride west, a copy of Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time.

Was this a shrewd choice, Serebin wondered, or the only Russian book in the store? Maybe shrewd, he thought, as the train clattered toward Sofia. Lermontov had been banished from the Guards Hussars, after writing a poem that attacked the Russian oligarchy for the death of Pushkin, and exiled to the Caucasus as a regular army officer. Was there cited for bravery, in 1837, but the Czar refused him the medal. Eventually, he was killed in a duel, as witless as any in literary history, at the age of twenty-six. A disordered life, in detail not anything like Serebin’s, but chaotic enough.

“Have you spent long in Cechnia?”

“I had about ten years there with my company in a fort near Kamenny Brod. Do you know it?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Ah, those cutthroats gave us a time of it! They’re quieter now, thank heavens, but once you went a hundred yards from the stockade there’d be some shaggy devil on the lookout, and you’d only to blink an eyelid and before you knew where you were you had a lasso round your neck or a bullet in your head. Grand chaps!”

He looked up to see a girl with a basket waiting for the train to go past. Well, whatever else might be true, Polanyi had chosen a book that every Russian had read, but that every Russian liked reading again. And, by the time he reached Subotica, in Yugoslavia, the Balabukhi plums were more than welcome, to Serebin and his fellow travelers, since there’d been practically nothing to eat at the station buffets where the train stopped.

28 January. In Istanbul, Janos Polanyi sat at a table on the second floor of a waterfront lokanta called Karim Bey. He drank a glass of raki as he waited, staring out at a long line of Turkish porters, struggling up the gangplank of a freighter beneath immense burlap sacks.

He was not at all pleased to be there, and he did not look forward to lunch-with the fattish and soft-spoken Mr. Brown and his relentless pipe. His infuriating pipe, a device used to stretch silent pauses out to uncomfortable intervals where disapproval hung in the air amid the fruity smoke. Polanyi unfolded his napkin and refolded it, he was tense and apprehensive and he didn’t like it. What he had to offer Mr. Brown was the best that could be offered but he feared, expected, the usual reaction: a cold, tolerant silence seasoned with contempt. For who he was, for what he did, and for the quality of his proposals. As a social attitude it was, of course, beneath him: an aristocrat from a thousand-year family need not concern himself with the Mr. Browns of the world. But, applied to secret work, this contempt could kill.

Polanyi had always suspected that Mr. Brown was an amateur of chess. That he saw a world of pawns and bishops and helpless kings. But the people who did what Polanyi asked of them were not pawns. They lived, Serebin and Marrano and Marie-Galante and the rest, and he meant for them to keep living. But it would better suit Mr. Brown, he believed, if he could be made to suppress this instinct and sacrifice the occasional pawn for a stronger position on the board.

Polanyi was on the verge of making himself really angry when Mr. Brown approached the table. Fortunately for everyone, perhaps, he was not alone. “This is Mr. Stephens,” he said.

Polanyi stood up and, as they shook hands, the man said, “Julian Stephens.”

A first name! A minor adjustment in the introduction, but it implied a change of style, a change of attitude, and Polanyi’s spirits rose. Stephens took the floor immediately. He was pleased to meet him, had heard such good things about him, was anxious to work with him, Istanbul was an extraordinary city, was it not, and so forth, and so on. Social talk. But, as he spoke, Polanyi began to understand who he was.

A man of some depth, and some cruelty. No, not quite, more the capacity for cruelty. He was maybe thirty-five, a boyish thirty-five, pale, with thin lips and straight hair, straw-colored, cut short above the ears and combed back from a part on the side. And there was something in his manner that brought to mind a story Polanyi had heard long ago, to do with savage contests of intellect that took place at high table at Oxford. No quarter asked and none given, a reputation made or ruined, in a world where reputation meant everything. Had he, in fact, come from the university? Not really any way to know that. Law, or banking, or commerce, the possibilities were endless but, whatever it was, he had been to the wars, and, Polanyi sensed, won them.

“I believe,” Mr. Brown said, “that the two of you will get on well together.”

“I would think so,” Polanyi said.

“What we’ve done,” Mr. Brown said, “is to create a new and different kind of office. At the direction of the prime minister himself, I should add. That will specialize in operations meant to damage the enemy’s industry-particularly war-related industry, his transport, and communications.”

“An office for sabotage,” Polanyi said.

“Yes,” Stephens said. “With the kind of technical support that will make it work.”

Polanyi nodded. This was a good idea, if they meant it. “In the Balkans?”

“Everywhere,” Stephens said. “In the occupied countries.”

“So Switzerland will be left alone.”

“For the moment,” Stephens said, with a thin smile.

“My office will continue as it always has,” Mr. Brown said. “But we will deal strictly with intelligence. In that regard, you and I may work together again, but, for the present, Mr. Stephens is your man.”

Mr. Brown rose and offered Polanyi his hand. “I will leave you to it,” he said. His demeanor was amiable enough, but Polanyi wasn’t persuaded. Whatever else this was, Mr. Brown took it as defeat. Somewhere, in some distant office in the green and pleasant land, there’d been a battle of meetings and memoranda, and Mr. Brown’s side had come off second best.

Stephens watched as his colleague left. Then he said, “So then, here we are. I’d better tell you right away that I’m new to this, ah, this sort of thing. I expect you know that. But, I tend to learn quickly, and the people in London will let me do pretty much whatever I want. For the time being, anyhow, so we’d best take advantage of the honeymoon, right?” He opened the menu and peered at it. “I suppose we should order lunch.”

“Probably we should.”

He read down the page and closed the menu. “Haven’t the faintest idea what any of it is, would you order for me? Nothing too ambitious, if you don’t mind.”

“Perhaps a drink, to start.”

“I daresay. What are you having?”

“Raki.”

“Is it very strong?”

“It is.”

“Splendid.”

Polanyi signaled to the waiter, standing idle in the corner. “And then, lamb?”

“Yes, lamb, good.” He folded the menu and placed it beside him, then took a pen and a small pad from his pocket, unscrewed the top of the pen, and opened the pad to a clean page. “Now,” he said, “on the way down here I had an idea.”

A quiet afternoon in January. The Parisian weather, lately come to its senses, cloudy and gray and soft. One of the city’s favored weathers, this gloom, good for making love, good for idle speculation and small pleasures. This was at heart a southern city, a Latin city, its residents forced to live in the north, between Englishmen and Germans, energetic souls who liked bright sunshine and brisk mornings. Well, they were welcome to it. The true Parisians, and Serebin was one of them, woke happily to damp twilight and, even in an occupied city, believed that anything was possible.

In a narrow street by the Place Bastille, the elegant Brasserie Heininger was closed on Mondays, its red and gold affluence lost in darkness, its gallant waiters home with their wives, its glorious platters of langouste and sausage only aromatic memories in the still air. At the infamous Table Fourteen, where a bullet hole in the mirror served as memorial to a Bulgarian headwaiter assassinated in the Ladies WC, the chairs leaned forward, propped against the table. All was silent, waiting for Tuesday.

But not quite. The kitchen was alive. By some vaguely defined droit de chef, the talented but fulminous Zubotnik served Monday lunch, a banquet of leftovers, to his emigre friends. Zubotnik had never actually thrown his cleaver at anybody but he shook it, often enough, and screamed in six languages. He had ruled the kitchen at the Aquarium restaurant in St. Petersburg, made his way to Paris in 1917, worked as a sous-chef for a month, then, when the incumbent chef fled to Lyons, crying out as he went through the door, “No human man can turn that color,” had, at a horrendous rise in salary, agreed to replace him. Papa Heininger had regretted that decision for twenty-three years but Zubotnik was a genius and what could you do.

Serebin attended the Monday feast whenever he could. He had, since childhood, a passion for second-day delicacies. They got better overnight, and tasted better yet when eaten in the kitchen instead of the dining room.

“Here, you,” Zubotnik said from his white beard. “Take some of this.”

Serebin carefully sawed a slice off half a beef Wellington, the crust still flaky after a night in the refrigerator. He put a teaspoon of Zubotnik’s brutal mustard beside it, and considered a second until Zubotnik growled, “Don’t murder it, Serebin. And give Anya some mousse.”

“Thank you but no, Ivan Ivanovich,” Anya said.

“Just do what I tell you,” Zubotnik said to Serebin.

“Only a little,” Serebin said, commiserating. The salmon mousse had been chilled in a fish-shaped mold and Serebin gave her one of the tail fins.

“While you’re up,” Ulzhen said, extending his plate.

They sat at the long wooden table in the kitchen. Serebin, Boris Ulzhen, the poet Anya Zak, the taxi driver Klimov and Claudette, his Franco-Russian girlfriend, and Solovy the robber.

Serebin poured himself a glass of red wine from the large flask. There were various appellations and vintages in the flask, blended by chance from bottles unfinished by Sunday night’s patrons. Zubotnik and his friends could eat whatever they wanted at the Monday lunch but Papa Heininger would clutch his heart in an alarming way when Zubotnik visited the cellars so the chef, realizing that life would go better if the proprietaire remained aboveground, had forsworn the bins.

“To the Zubotnik ’41,” Klimov said, raising his glass.

“Na zdorov’ye!”

“Na zdorov’ye!”

“Ilya Aleksandrovich,” Anya Zak said, “please to continue your story.” She waited attentively, her bright, nearsighted eyes peering at him through old-fashioned spectacles. Solovy began to roll a cigarette, taking long strands of tobacco from a cloth pouch.

“So,” Serebin said, “we came to Bryansk at dawn. We’d heard that Makhno’s people had occupied the city, but we didn’t hear anything. They were always loud, those people, fighting or not, women’s screams and pistol shots and great shouts of laughter. But it was very quiet in the city. A little smoke from the burnt-out houses, not much else. ‘Take a squad,’ the captain said, ‘and go see what’s what.’ So off we went, using whatever cover we could find, just waiting for the snipers, but nothing happened. You could see the looters had been there, stuff they didn’t want dropped in the street. Clothes and toys and pans, half a painting. Then I saw the goat, it came walking toward us, casually enough, staring at me with those strange eyes, just going about its business until somebody came and put a rope around its neck. Something funny about this goat, I thought. I looked closer, and saw a long shred of yellow paper hanging out of its mouth, with the printed words Genius and Dissipation. My sergeant saw it at the same time I did and we both started to laugh, almost couldn’t stop. We’d been fighting for a day and a half and we were a little crazy, the way you get. He had to sit down in the street, there were tears running down his cheeks. All this made the goat self-conscious and it began to finish the paper, Genius and Dissipation rolling up into its mouth as it chewed.

“One of the men called out from a doorway, ‘The hell’s gotten into you?’ but we couldn’t answer. I mean, go try and explain something like that. And we really couldn’t figure it out, just then, not for about thirty minutes. Then we got into the center of the city and saw the posters. Stuck up on the wall of a theatre with flour glue, which goats like. The posters announced the appearance of the actor Orlenev, coming to Bryansk to play the role of the English tragedian Edmund Kean in the play called Kean, or Genius and Dissipation. ”

Solovy snorted with laughter, but he was the only one.

“Bryansk was the worst,” Ulzhen said.

“Berdichev,” Zubotnik said. He cut a piece of baguette, put smoked salmon on it, then a drizzle of oil, and handed it to Claudette.

“Still,” she said to Serebin, “you miss it, your terrible Russia.”

“Sometimes.”

“They all came through Berdichev,” Klimov said. “Taken and retaken twenty-seven times. Makhno’s band, Petlyura’s band, Tutnik’s partisans. ‘And,’ they used to say, ‘Nobody’s Ninth Regiment.’”

“You remember everything,” Solovy said.

“I remember,” Klimov said. “Jewish prayer shawls used as saddlecloths.”

Claudette ate her salmon with a knife and fork. Serebin poured wine for Ulzhen and Anya Zak. “Oh, thank you,” she said.

“The winter Harvest was a great success,” Ulzhen said to Serebin. “I’ve been wanting to tell you that but you haven’t been around.”

“Yes, very good,” Solovy said.

“The Babel, of course,” Ulzhen said. “Everybody talked about it. That, and Kacherin’s poem to his mother.”

“No,” Serebin said. “You’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

“It had feeling,” Zubotnik said. “ Real feeling, sincerity, what’s wrong with that? Didn’t you have a mother?”

“So now,” Ulzhen said, “you have only to worry about spring.”

“Anya Zak will be in that one,” Serebin said. He knew better. Zak published only in the best quarterlies, she would never, never, submit to a magazine like The Harvest.

“Will she?” Zubotnik said. He gave money to the IRU.

Her glance at Serebin was covert, and not amused, how could you? “I wish I had something,” she lamented. “I’ve been working on a long piece, for weeks, the whole winter, but, we shall see, maybe, if I can finish…”

“We would, of course, be honored,” Ulzhen said, lingering on the would.

“You should try the salmon, Tolya,” Claudette said to Klimov.

“Mm,” Zubotnik said. He cut some bread and salmon and passed it across the table.

Ulzhen set his napkin down. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said. As he stood up, he met Serebin’s eyes, come with me.

Serebin followed him from the kitchen out to the bar that bordered the darkened restaurant, then into the men’s room. Ulzhen looked for a light switch on the wall but he couldn’t find it.

“I’ll hold the door for you,” Serebin said.

“Doesn’t matter.”

Serebin held the door ajar while Ulzhen used the urinal. “Ilya Aleksandrovich,” he said, his voice echoing faintly off the tiled wall, “we need your help.” He finished, began to button his fly.

“All right,” Serebin said.

“A committee,” Ulzhen said. He went to the sink and turned the water on. “Only four of us.” He mentioned two people that Serebin barely knew-the widow of a German industrialist, very rich, who had come to live in Paris years earlier, and a thin, serious, older man who hardly said a word to anybody. To Serebin, this made no sense at all.

“Committee?”

“She has the money,” Ulzhen said. “And he was an officer in the military intelligence.”

“To do what?”

“For our Jews, Ilya.” He washed his hands, then began to dry them with a towel from the stack on the attendant’s table. “Eighty-nine of our members, as far as we can determine. And their families, that number we don’t know. But we’ve decided to get them out, if they want to go. First into the Unoccupied Zone, the Vichy zone, in the south, then to Nice. There are still boats that will take passengers, we’ll provide documents and whatever money we can manage. We know we can get them to Spain, at least that far, then, maybe, South America. So, it’s a very quiet committee.”

“Secret.”

“Yes.”

Serebin felt ill. He had to go to Marseilles in two days, then God only knew where after that. He heard laughter from the kitchen.

“Why me?” That loathsome phrase, out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“Why you?” Ulzhen had heard it loud and clear. “Because you don’t flinch, Ilya. Because the fact that you can take care of yourself means that you can take care of people who can’t, and, most of all, because I want you there with me.”

“Boris,” he said.

To tell? Not to tell? Excuses poured through his mind like water, this lie or that, one worse than the next.

“Yes? What?” Ulzhen dropped the towel in a basket by the table.

“I can’t.”

“Of course you can.”

Now he couldn’t say anything.

“What is it, some business you’re doing with Ivan Kostyka? Is that it? You want money, all of a sudden?”

Serebin didn’t answer.

“Look, this has everything to do with Poland, I don’t need to tell you the stories, and it’s coming here. Nothing wrong with chess tournaments and magazines, Ilya, but we’re responsible for these people. They’re coming to me, they’re asking for help. What am I to tell them? You’re busy?”

“Boris, I have to do something else. I am doing something else. For God’s sake don’t make me tell you more than that.”

“You are?” He was going back and forth-truth or cowardice?

“Yes.”

“Swear it to me.”

“I swear. On anything you like. Please understand, as long as I’m in Paris, I’ll do whatever you want. But I cannot promise to be in such and such a place at such and such a time, and, in what you’re talking about, that’s everything.”

Ulzhen took a deep breath and let it out. It meant concession-to disappointment, betrayal. That betrayal came for some noble reason, ghostly, beyond explanation, did not matter.

“How did this happen?” Ulzhen said, defeat in his voice.

“I got involved,” Serebin said.

Ulzhen wanted to argue, then thought better of it. “Well, you have to do what you think is right,” he said.

“I know.” Serebin looked for words, to somehow bridge the space that had opened between them, but all he could say was, “I’m sorry, Boris.”

Ulzhen shrugged. So life went.

It was almost five when they left. Klimov and Claudette, Anya Zak and Serebin walking together for a time, then parting at the rue de Turenne, where Anya Zak headed off into the Eleventh and Serebin went with her. To a street that reminded Serebin of the tenement districts of Russian cities, old and poor and silent, where Anya Zak had a room above a tailor shop. “It isn’t much,” she said, “but you can come up if you want.” He did. He was very lonely, and he couldn’t face going back to the Winchester just to be by himself.

A small room, cluttered and warmed with things she liked. A fish bowl filled with mussel shells on an upturned crate, Bal Musette posters and Victorian silhouettes tacked to the wall. Books everywhere, a glass of dried weeds, a copper lion.

They talked idly for a while, then she read him a poem. “No title yet,” she said. “For me, that is always difficult.” She settled herself into the corner of an easy chair, drew her feet up beneath her bulky skirt, and read from a paper in one hand while the other held a Sobranie, its blue smoke curling straight up in the airless room. The poem was intricate, about a lover, more or less, the lines simple, declarative, and opaque. She’d been, sometime, somewhere, easy prey. Was still? Didn’t care? “But the heart was blind that summer,” she recited, inhaled the cigarette, spoke the next line in puffs of smoke. Loss in a crowded room, in a storm, a dream, a shop. She had long dark hair, with a few silver strands, that hung down around her face, and, as she read, she would tuck one side of it behind her ear but it didn’t stay. She looked up at him when she finished and said, “Awful, isn’t it.”

“No, not at all.”

“A little awful, admit it. One’s intimate self is, you know.”

She was narrow-shouldered and lean on top, broad below the waist, heavy-legged. On the windowsill by the bed, half a burned candle, its wax congealed in a saucer. “You are looking at me,” she said.

“True.” He smiled at her.

“Tell me, are you working?”

“I wish I could, but life takes sharp corners, lately, so all I do is watch the road. A line sometimes, now and then, but who knows where it belongs.”

She understood. “They are killing us,” she said. “One way and another.”

“What will become of you, Anya?”

“Such a question!”

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean…”

“No, it’s all right,” she said. “I know what you mean. In fact, I think I’ve been offered a way out, if things go wrong here. About a year ago I met this couple. Nice enough, haute bourgeois types, but sweet. They were rich and social, before the occupation. Likely still are, now that I think about it. Anyhow, they somewhat adopted me, the saintly poetess, poor as a mouse, you know how it is. Sunday afternoons, they would have me up to their apartment, in Passy, all kinds of sexy nonsense in the air though nothing said, of course. Then, about a month ago, they told me that they had a little house in a village, in Normandy somewhere, at the end of a road, and if life went bad in Paris, I was invited to go up there and hide out for as long as I needed to.”

“I hope it doesn’t come to that,” Serebin said. “Still…”

“What about you?” she said.

“I don’t think I’ll have to run,” he said. “Of course, you can never be certain.”

“No you can’t. Not about anything, ever. You and I know all about that.” She took her spectacles off, blinked at a fuzzy world, folded them up, and put them on the table beside her.

More would come off, he imagined. Everything. By the light of the candle on the windowsill. And, as time went by, she would wear the very same smile she wore at the moment, opening, as her eyes closed, to a shape he dearly loved to see. Stripped, languid, appetitious, a true partner in crime, no saintly poetess at all and very pointed about it. Oh, his heart might be a little somewhere else, but that he couldn’t help and there was no way on earth she could know about it.

“Well,” she said.

As he stood up, she leaned her head back against the top of the chair. “Getting late,” she said. “Would you like to come and kiss me good night?”

As he walked toward the hotel, a long way away, it occurred to him that maybe she did know. Sensed it, understood him better than he thought possible. But, whether she did or she didn’t, it had been a long kiss good night, warm and elaborate, and a lot happened while it was going on. Was it possible they’d had a love affair? A thirty-second love affair? Well, why not. He stopped at the far end of the Pont Marie. I’ll do anything you like. She hadn’t said it out loud but even so she’d told him that. He wasn’t wrong. He could turn around, go back, she’d be waiting for him. No, he thought, that’s crazy. Don’t think about it, go home to bed.

A direct order, half of which he obeyed.

Polanyi’s Orchestra.

Performing the Roumanian Symphony, Opus 137.

Was it 137? One hundred and thirty-seven operations? He’d tried, now and then, to count them all, but it never worked. What to include? What to leave out? It wasn’t always clear, so, in the end, he declared it to be, over thirty years, some number not far from that, then burned the notes-jotted initials and dates, typically on the backs of envelopes-and got rid of the ashes.

This one had, at least, a name. Medallion. Or, Operation MEDALLION, as it would appear in the records. Not that any of the people involved would ever be allowed to know it, that was for him and Stephens, and the warlords in London. Medallion. He hoped it sounded noble and enduring, in English. It certainly sounded damned strange in Hungarian, but then what didn’t.

It was by his own initiative that Jamie Carr played in the orchestra. In fact, he belonged to a different operation, with another name, yet, even so, he played. When inspiration struck he was with Girlfriend Three, a tall Polish nightclub dancer with penciled eyebrows. They were alone in an office, the street outside deserted on a Sunday morning.

Time to leave, they’d told him. The British legation in Bucharest would close down on the 10th of February, be gone by then. So, he’d packed. Taking along much more than he’d planned-what a lot of stuff he’d acquired! Clothes and books and papers and whatnot from the apartment. The iron lamp in the parlor, for example. Lots of memories in that lamp, couldn’t just leave it behind. And, of course, he’d take a few things from his desk at the office, good friends, with him for two long years of writing and conniving.

Once in the office-Girlfriend Three had spent the night and come along to keep him company-he thought, well, pity to leave all these files. Press clippings, cabinets packed with them. He wanted, at first, a few for his own purposes. He liked them. Taken together, they constituted a sort of surreal history of his life in Roumania. Here was Zizi Lambrino, King Carol’s paramour and the subject of great scandale before Lupescu snatched the king for her own. And here was Conradi, chief of the Gestapo in Roumania. Crippled below the waist, with the head of a Roman emperor and a huge chest, he lay in bed all day long and received a steady stream of informants.

The stack grew higher and higher. “What good this?” Girlfriend Three said, looking through the columns of newsprint glued to yellowing paper. He wasn’t entirely sure, but how else to remember Sofrescu and Manescu and Emil Gulian? For a moment, he had visions of taking it all-let the porters come and put the cabinets on the train. These offices were going to close, forever, these offices were going to be in the middle of a fiery war. But then, he thought better of that and took only the best, the strangest, stacking them carefully as a sullen Girlfriend Three sat in a swivel chair and shot paper clips out the window with a rubber band.

Marrano, after a difficult night at sea, was in Beirut.

In the bar of a small hotel near the harbor. A lizard slept on the wall, strips of flypaper hung from the ceiling, a French naval officer in the corner was drinking absinthe, and Professor Doktor Finkelheim, late of Vienna, sat across the table, a cup of tea cooling in front of him. Finkelheim, wearing a brown shirt and a green tie with a stain on it, looked like a hamster.

At the moment, a gloomy hamster. Sad to say, he told Marrano, his research materials had been abandoned in Vienna, he’d escaped with his life and little else. Yes, it was true that he’d been preeminent in his field, geology, and had specialized in riparian formations-that is, the structure of rivers-especially those that drained into the Danubian basin. The tributaries; the Drava, the Tisza, the Morava and the Mlava, and the mighty and magnificent Danube itself.

“But not the water,” he said. “Don’t ask me about the water. For that you would see my former colleague, Doktor Kubel, who remains in Vienna. If, on the other hand, you are interested in the banks of the rivers, then you’ve got the right fellow.”

What about, say, depth.

That would be Finkelheim. Seasonal flow, current, rock strata, all Finkelheim. Micro-organisms? Salinity? Fishes and eels? Kubel.

“Perfectly understood,” Marrano said. And he understood, as well, that research materials would be crucial to any study that the professor might agree to undertake. However, it just so happened that he was in possession of certain maps, good ones, that showed the rivers in detail. Would the professor, he wondered, be willing to review these maps, especially with regard to those characteristics that made navigation on the rivers possible?

Or, sometimes, impossible?

Oh yes.

Serebin played in the orchestra by going to Marseilles.

He stopped by the Gestapo office on the rue Montaigne to apply for the permit, was politely stalled, went again, then managed on the third try. They had finally, after some hesitation, accepted his Reason for Travel, as the form put it: an important emigre in distress-the name lifted from the files in the IRU office-a mission of mercy. He could have sought help from Helmut Bach, the Wehrmacht intellectual, but he sensed a turning point in his relations with Bach. The moment of truth- the time has come for you to do a little favor for us — was close at hand, and Serebin badly wanted to avoid the confrontation. In fact, they’d been uncomfortably polite to him at the rue Montaigne office. Fascism famously stomped around in jackboots, but it sometimes wore carpet slippers, padding about softly on the edges of one’s life, and in a way that was worse. And, he thought, they knew it.

So it went. It was the 10th of February by the time he got on the train. Crossed into the Unoccupied Zone below Lyons at midday, reached Marseilles at night, and kept his appointment with the emigre, a senior civil servant in the Czar’s last days. After ten years in France, his wife had abandoned him, taking the children with her, so he’d gambled all his money away, was thrown out of his apartment, and drank himself into the hospital. Otherwise, all went well.

This he explained to Serebin at some length, in a room in a boardinghouse in the Arab quarter. He’d never really liked the wife, the children were almost grown and he still saw them, money was money it came and it went, and, as for the vodka, he’d learned his lesson. “From now on I will follow the French example,” he told Serebin, “and drink wine.” A question of geography, he believed. In Russia, the weather, the air, the water, the very nature of life, was elementally antidotal to vodka, but, if you changed countries, you had to change drinks. “As a journalist, Ilya Aleksandrovich, this might be useful to you.” Serebin tried to look intrigued, an interesting idea. In fact, the man was either completely unhinged or far too sane and, in the end, Serebin realized, it didn’t matter. He gave him money, a copy of The Harvest, and all the sympathy and encouragement he could bear, then went off to a small hotel in the back streets of the city’s Old Port.

The following morning, he was to see a Roumanian called Ferenczy, formerly a Danube river pilot. Polanyi had given him the details in the hotel room in Edirne. In the spring of 1939, when Hitler had taken the remainder of Czechoslovakia and war seemed inevitable, the French Service de Renseignements had tried to interrupt Germany’s oil supply by bribing the Danube river pilots to leave the country. Some had, some hadn’t, and the operation failed. Which left the French intelligence service with a number of Roumanian pilots scattered across Europe. In Ferenczy’s case, they’d tried to help, restarting his life in Marseilles, where he’d become a trader; first in opium, then in pearls. The man’s name, Polanyi said, indicated Hungarian descent. Which had likely, now and again, made life hard for him, so he was perhaps never all that loyal to the Roumanian state. “A man with allegiance only to himself,” Polanyi suggested. “If it was me, I’d start with that assumption, but, as usual, you’ll have to make your own way.”

Using the Marchais alias, Serebin telephoned the pilot. He was, he said, “a friend of your good friends in France.” Ferenczy, after some desultory sparring, accepted that explanation and agreed to see him in an hour.

Serebin was surprised to find himself invited to the man’s apartment-a cafe would have been the traditional place to meet a stranger-but, as soon as the door opened, he understood why. Ferenczy meant him to behold the trappings of success. And so he did, pausing at the threshold of a parlor that virtually groaned with trappings. New and expensive furniture, shimmering fabrics, a splendid radio, a Victrola and a long shelf of records, a marble nymph, her hand reaching languorously for a crystal lamp. Ferenczy, in red velvet smoking jacket and emerald green ascot, beamed as Serebin took it all in and offered him a very old cognac, which he declined.

“Yes,” he told Serebin, answering an unasked question, “fortune has smiled on me.”

“Clearly it has, even in the midst of war.”

“Business has never been better.”

“Still, the fall of France…”

“A catastrophe, but she will rise again, monsieur. She is indomitable.”

Serebin agreed.

“Always I admired this nation,” Ferenczy said. “Then, by a stroke of luck, I was given a second chance at life. So I have, in effect, married my mistress.”

“Well, your mistress needs your help.”

Ferenczy’s smile vanished, his expression now stern and patriotic.

“We are seeking information,” Serebin said. “Firsthand information, the kind of thing known only to somebody with practical experience. You spent much of your life on the Danube, you know its habits, its peculiarities. That’s what concerns us at the moment. Specifically, those stretches of the river where navigation is difficult, those areas where an accident, to a tug or a barge, would tend to disrupt the normal flow of commerce.”

“Commerce in petroleum.”

“Yes. As in ’39.” Serebin produced a pencil and a notepad.

“It’s a long river,” Ferenczy said, “much of it broad and flat. From Vienna down to Budapest, all the way past Belgrade, the major hazard is flooding, and that depends on the spring rains. So, for your purposes, what you want is the Kazan Gorge, where the river passes through the Carpathians. Using the common method of calculation, distance from the Roumanian delta on the Black Sea, that would be from kilometer 1060 down to 940. At that point, the river runs south, and forms the border between Yugoslavia and Roumania, and the section from Golubac, on the Yugoslavian side, down to Sip, turns into sixty-five miles of rapids, where the river sometimes narrows to a hundred and sixty yards. At the end of this stretch is the Djerdap, in Roumanian Portile de Fier, the Iron Gates. After that, the river widens, and runs on a flat plain to the sea, and there you can do very little.”

“And the depth?”

“God knows! In some places, fifteen hundred feet, in others, depending on the season, it can be as shallow as thirty feet, especially over what’s called the Stenka ridge, where narrow channels are marked by buoys. You’re actually in the mountains, you see, passing over submerged peaks and valleys. And it’s dangerous-all shipping must take on a river pilot, that’s the rule of the Danube Commission. Going downstream, the pilot boards at Moldova Veche, on the Roumanian shore across from Golubac. If you’re headed the other way, the ship station is at Kladovo, but the Iron Gates, just north of there, are no longer the problem they used to be. After the Great War, Austrian engineers dug the Dezvrin ship canal, about two and a half kilometers in length, to bypass the rapids. But, even with the canal, the current is so strong that the engineers had to build a section of railway on the road above the canal, in order to use a towing engine that pulls traffic upstream by means of a cable.”

“So, then,” Serebin said, staring down at his notes, which made no sense at all.

Ferenczy rose abruptly, sat next to Serebin on the couch, and took his pad and pencil. “Here is Golubac,” he said, writing 1046 next to the name. A specific kilometer? Of course. He probably knew it meter by meter. With some amazement, Serebin watched as a river pilot emerged from the persona of a middle-aged French fop. Ferenczy drew with a firm hand, using dashes down the center of the river to show the border, printing Dunav on the Serbian side, Dunarea on the Roumanian, for the river changed languages along with its depths and channels. The pilot drew teardrop-shaped rocks, an island, a road. “Here is Babakai rock,” he said. “In 1788, the Austrians stretched a chain across here to trap the Turkish navy. It’s a red rock, you can’t miss it.” At 1030, the Stenka ridge, three kilometers to 1027. In the middle, another rock. Next came Klissura. “Greek word,” Ferenczy said. “Means, ah, crevice. Very narrow, maybe too deep.” And down and down, here it curved, then curved back again, the river Czerna joined at 954, then the course twisted violently south, ten kilometers northwest of the Iron Gates. “After this,” Ferenczy said, “the ship canal.”

He handed the paper back to Serebin and returned to his chair.

“Can we do it?” Serebin said.

“Maybe.”

Serebin imagined the river at night, rushing water, dark cliffs above, a tugboat fighting the current as sailors hung off the side and tried to fix an iron hook on a sunken barge below the surface.

He ran his finger up the drawing and back down, pausing at the Babakai rock. “The Austrian chain,” he said. “Did it work?”

“No,” Ferenczy said. “Betrayed,” he added. “You have to remember where you are.”

Serebin returned to Paris the following day, arriving at the Winchester a little after five o’clock. There was a spectre standing in the doorway of the pharmacy next to the hotel. Some poor clochard, a shapeless figure in a ragged coat, just visible in the early evening light. The spectre stepped forward and called out to him in a stage whisper. “Serebin.”

Serebin squinted at the man as he approached. He looked, face starved and narrow and white, like a martyred saint in a Spanish painting-a saint with his beard shaved off. “Kubalsky? Serge?”

It was. He nodded, sorrowfully, in reply, understanding all too well why Serebin wasn’t sure.

They walked together through the lobby, the night clerk watching them from behind his desk. He might, Serebin thought, report what he’d seen, but that was the way things were, lately, and nothing to be done about it.

Climbing the stairs at Kubalsky’s side, Serebin noticed that he now walked with a limp, and, the way Serebin put it to himself, that he reeked of flight. Of mold and mildew, of dried sweat. In the room, Kubalsky sat heavily in a chair by the desk, Serebin gave him a cigarette and lit it for him. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, exhaled long plumes of smoke that swirled and drifted about his face, a creature whose body ran on smoke instead of blood. And for that moment, Serebin thought, he became once again what he’d been all his life-The Journalist. For the gossip papers, the timber news, the mining gazette, writing a paragraph and counting the words, showing up at an office to see about his check.

After a long silence, Kubalsky said “Christ,” quietly, almost to himself, then, “Don’t worry, Ilya, I can’t stay here.”

“I’m not worried.”

“An hour, maybe. No more.”

Kubalsky started to go to sleep, cigarette still smoldering between his fingers. “Serge,” Serebin said. “Can you tell me where you’ve been?”

His eyes opened. “Here and there,” he said. “Down every rathole in the Balkans. It’s crowded, I should warn you, in case you’re thinking of trying it, you keep running into the same people.”

“You know, we thought you were…”

“Yes, I thought so too. In that alley behind the theatre. One of them got a hand on me, like a steel claw, but I hit him. Imagine that, but I did. He didn’t like it, roared like a bull. Then shot at me as I ran away. I don’t think either of us believed how hard I hit him. Nothing quite like fear, Ilya, really, nothing like it.”

“Organy?” It meant the men who worked for the organs of state security, the NKVD.

“They were.”

“Why, Serge?”

“Why not?”

That was, Serebin thought, glib, and ingenuous, but until a better two-word history of the USSR came along, it would do. Nonetheless, Serebin waited for the rest.

“All right,” Kubalsky sighed, resignation heavy in his voice. “Sometime last year, June maybe, they showed up, one day, the way they do, and informed me that I had to talk to them. Or else. So, no choice-with these people you don’t argue. All you can do is make sure you’re never, ah, productive, so I wasn’t. Still, there they were.

“Then, one day in November, they told me to call you and get you out of the IRU ceremony. They didn’t say why, they don’t, just ‘Here’s what we want.’ But that evening, after the bombing, one of them came to my room. He wanted to know about the Turkish authorities-had they contacted me, had they contacted anyone else? Particularly, what kind of authority? The Istanbul police? The Emniyet? If the Emniyet, who? What rank? I didn’t know a thing and I told him so. Well, he said, get in touch when it happens, because it will. Now, for some reason he was alone. It’s never like that, you know, there’s always two of them, they watch each other. But this one was alone, and he talked-the kind of talk that follows a triumph. He told me how the thing had been done; a man at the window, a signal when Goldbark went to look at his delivery, wasn’t it all too clever for words.

“After he left, I began to suffer, there’s no other word for it. I walked the streets for hours, drank up whatever money I had in my pocket, tried to calm down, but I couldn’t. I was stuck midway between anguish and fury and I just couldn’t get free. The next day, when it didn’t go away, I understood that I had to make it go away. I mean, Goldbark had always been kind to me, to everyone, and then, I had to ask myself what came next-what else would they want? Then I realized that I had to talk to somebody, and the only person that made sense was you. Now, why they wanted you out of there I don’t know, don’t want to know-I surely don’t believe it was because you were their special friend, I know you and them far too well for that. So, I tried to meet with you, secretly, and apparently I did something wrong, because they showed up at the movie theatre. Not the ones I usually saw, others, the big ones in the baggy suits.

“Anyhow, I got away, and I hid for a time in the city, but I figured I couldn’t do that forever, so I sold whatever I owned, maybe even a few things I didn’t own, and I ran. Up into Bulgaria, Salonika, you name it. Finally, I had some luck, met an emigre Pole who worked on a train and got a ride to Paris in a freight car. I took a chance on the IRU office on the rue Daru, and found Boris Ulzhen, who told me where you were. I should add that he asked me no questions at all, whatever that means, just acted like it was all in a day’s work. Which, come to think of it, it probably is, by now.”

Serebin went looking for his vodka. Maybe a third of a bottle left. He poured two glasses and gave one to Kubalsky.

“Thank you,” Kubalsky said. “Of course I need money.”

For a moment, Serebin had a vision of his grandfather. He was laughing, which was typical of him, he did it all the time, though Serebin had been too young when he died to realize how much that meant. In this vision, he was laughing at his grandson. Think it’s a blessing? Yes? Ha, you’ll see, my dear, you’ll see.

He saw. Rummaging in the top drawer of his bureau, then remembering to include what he had in his pocket. Still, it was a blessing, that night anyhow, to have something he could give Kubalsky. “Could be more, tomorrow,” he said, handing over the money.

From Kubalsky, an indulgent smile. No tomorrow.

“And so, what next?”

“More of the same. I’ll run around like a chicken with its head cut off, like half the people in Europe, while the other half tries to hide them, and the other half is looking for them.”

“Ah, Russian mathematics.”

“Na zdorov’ye.”

“You’re very popular, this week,” Ulzhen said.

Serebin was at the IRU office to help with the newsletter-everything from correcting spelling to advice and sympathy for the tiny lady who tried to work the mimeograph machine. A small crowd stood around her as the blotchy purplish copies came through, all of them creased strangely at the upper right corner. “Fucking devil, ” Ulzhen said under his breath. The tiny lady had moist eyes, wore a cross around her neck, and was known to be devout.

“It’s the feeder bar,” she said in despair. “The tension!”

“Popular?” Serebin said to Ulzhen. Ulzhen was not precisely chilly, lately, something else. Wary, perhaps. Anyhow different, since the afternoon at the Brasserie Heininger. Well, add that to the list of things in the world he could not fix, a list that only seemed to grow.

Ulzhen took off his jacket and turned his cuffs up, a brawl with the mimeograph machine was guaranteed to be filthy business. Serebin’s heart sped as he waited for an answer-he knew why Ulzhen had said that, and wondered only why Marie-Galante had chosen to make contact through the office.

“He called himself Jean Paul,” Ulzhen said.

“Who?”

“Jean Claude, is it? No, Jean Marc. There’s a message in your mailbox.”

Serebin went over to the wooden frame divided into boxes, found a poem for The Harvest, an announcement for a meeting of the Stamp Club, and a sheet of stationery from the Hotel Bristol with a phone number and a message, asking him to telephone so that they could arrange to meet and signed Jean Marc.

For a moment, Serebin had no idea, then he recalled the balcony of the hotel in Switzerland, and Ivan Kostyka’s homme de confiance. Disappointed, he headed for the IRU telephone.

Staying at the luxurious Bristol, Jean Marc had chosen a curious place for a meeting, a cafe in a small street in the 19th Arrondissement, by the St.-Martin canal-the abattoir district. Still, Serebin thought, watching unfamiliar Metro stops slide past, there wasn’t a square foot of Paris that didn’t have cachet for somebody. For those with a particularly elevated approach to their slumming, the onion-soup bistros over at the Halles markets had become passe, and, before the occupation had redrawn the social geography of the city, tuxedos and gowns had begun to appear at dawn in the neighborhood.

Serebin had a hard time finding it-even the streets liked to change their names up here. A common, local cafe, a bar, really, narrow and unlit, and virtually empty. Only two Arab men, drinking milky pastis, the proprietor, reading a newspaper by the cash register, and Jean Marc, sitting at a corner table in the back. He was as Serebin remembered him: young and handsome, tall, with an aristocratic stoop, face cold and aloof. “I hope you don’t mind this place,” he said, standing to greet Serebin. “It’s private, and I’m meeting friends later on, at Cochon d’Or. Good steaks from the district, and the Germans haven’t found it yet.”

When Serebin ordered a glass of wine, Jean Marc held up a hand. “They have scotch whiskey here, of course you’ll join me.”

“They do?”

“A good marque as it happens.” A sudden smile, all warmth and charm, as he rested the hand on Serebin’s arm. “A Parisian discovery, eh? Don’t go telling the world.”

“Two scotch?” the proprietor said.

“Oh, bring the bottle,” Jean Marc said.

A good idea for a February night, Serebin realized, the taste dry and smoky, anything but sweet.

“Baron Kostyka sends his regards,” Jean Marc said. “And hopes his, contacts in Roumania have turned out to be worthwhile.”

“Some of them, certainly. He’s in London?”

“He is. And delighted to be English, a new man. You’d be surprised how much he’s changed.”

Serebin had imagined, on getting Jean Marc’s note, that he’d been stationed on the continent, in charge of Kostyka’s European office. But, clearly, that wasn’t the case. “You came here from London?” he said.

“Long way round. The only way to do it, these days. Passenger steamer to Lisbon, then up from Spain. No problem-as long as you don’t get torpedoed. You do have to have British connections to get a place on the ship, and German connections to get into Paris, but, for Kostyka, everything is possible. It’s commerce, you know, both sides need it, so, at least for the moment, business transcends war.”

Serebin was impressed. From his own experience, he knew what it took to move around Europe, but this was a level of freedom well beyond that.

“I’m here for a week,” Jean Marc said, “then off to Geneva and Zurich-those meetings will go on for a while-and, eventually, back to London. What about you, will you stay in Paris?”

“For the time being.”

“Not so bad, is it?” Jean Marc refilled his glass, then Serebin’s.

“Can be difficult-it seems to depend on how the Germans are doing. When they’re content, when they think they’re winning, life gets easier.”

That made sense to Jean Marc. “But now, as I understand it, you’re about to make them feel a great deal less content.”

Serebin shrugged. “Oh, who knows,” he said.

“No, really,” Jean Marc said. “If your operations in Roumania work out, they’ll be in some considerable difficulty.”

“Well, it’s not up to me,” Serebin said. He began to feel, for no particular reason, the first stirrings of some vague, intuitive resistance.

“I can’t imagine why they’d call it off,” Jean Marc said, “after all this time and effort. Germany runs on that oil. If I were in charge, I wouldn’t stop until I’d done something about it.”

“Well,” Serebin said. It was all very complicated, wasn’t it. “Anyhow, the war goes on. Now there’s something they call the Afrika Korps, to campaign in North Africa. That’s been in the newspapers.”

“Yes, with Rommel in charge-which means they’re serious.”

Again, time for more scotch. Had the bottle been full when they started? It seemed that Jean Marc was in no hurry to meet his friends. Not a bad drinking companion, when all was said and done, the whiskey had a good effect on him, made him less guarded and distant. “I grew up in this city,” he told Serebin. “In the Seventh. A soft life, you would think, but not really.” What made it difficult, he explained, was that people envied privilege. And, in truth, why shouldn’t they? They saw a fine house in Paris, a chateau in the countryside, a stable, a cellar of old vintages, aristocracy. “Everything but money,” he said, “which is why I work for Ivan Kostyka.” Still, nobody knew about that, and one had to keep up appearances, one had to play the part. Which meant you had to think before you spoke, you had to be conscious, always, of who you were and what that meant. Really, you couldn’t trust people, that was the lesson learned by generations of nobility. People took advantage, didn’t they. Once they thought you were rich and powerful, it was your obligation to help them out. Not only with money, with influence, connection. Suddenly, you were their best friend.

Now maybe it didn’t matter so much, day by day, just something you learned to live with, and who really cared. But, when women were involved, well, then it was different, because the heart, the heart, had its own reasons.

Yes, they would drink to that. To women. To the heart.

What else, Jean Marc asked the world, made life worth living? What else mattered, compared to that? Yet even there, in that most private chamber-forgive the double entendre — even there, spontaneity, that wondrous, uncaring, ah, freedom, abandon, proved difficult to reach. So then, in those affairs, you paid for who you were, for what you were. For what you had to be. For example, Nicolette…

Serebin followed along. Yes, he understood. Yes, that was the way things were. Outside the cafe was Europe and all its sorrows, but Serebin tried not to think about it. After all, even with everything that went on out there, people still struggled with matters of the bed, matters of the heart.

Had he been in love with Nicolette? Jean Marc wasn’t sure. Well, maybe, in a way. At what point did desire become something more? She wasn’t the stableman’s daughter, far from it. Still, they belonged to different worlds, different worlds, and it made anything beyond a liaison impossible. Yet that innocence, that carefree giving, had taken him prisoner. So many times they were together for the last time! What could he have done differently? What? And, the longer it went on, the harder it was to let go of it. Did Serebin see that? Did he understand?

The homme de confiance unburdened his heart, the scotch whiskey sank low in the bottle. Could it be stronger than vodka? Across the table, Jean Marc’s face grew blurred and soft, and Serebin found himself slightly dizzy, leaning hard on the table. Jean Marc drank right along with him, but maybe he was used to it. And if Serebin got a little drunk, so what? I am being murdered, he thought.

What?

Where had that come from? Madness, no? See what a life of secrecy does to you!

He stood up, gestured toward the door at the back of the cafe. A visit to the petit coin, the little room.

Once there, he caught himself looking around for a window. His head swam-what was he going to do? Climb out into the alley? Run off into the night?

When he came back out, Jean Marc wasn’t at the table. Serebin couldn’t believe he’d simply left. At the bar, maybe. No. At, for whatever reason, another table? No. Only the two Arab men, now playing dominoes. Nothing unusual about them-heavy and dark, in the slightly mismatched coats and trousers they all wore. Serebin stared a moment too long-one of them glanced up at him, then looked away.

“Did my friend leave?” he asked the proprietor.

“He said he was late,” the man told him. “To tell you he was sorry, but he had to be off.”

“Oh.”

“It’s all paid for.”

Well, no point in staying there by himself. Serebin said good night to the proprietor, then went out the door. Now where? He remembered the trouble he’d had finding the place-a maze of unfamiliar streets, this one went off at an angle, that one cut across the other. He should have paid attention, on the way, but he hadn’t. The Metro was this way? He wasn’t sure. As he walked to the corner-maybe the name of the street would jog his memory-he heard a door close, somewhere behind him. When he turned around, he saw the two men standing in front of the cafe, talking. Just two friends, out for the evening.

He started walking. In Paris, you always found a boulevard, sooner or later. Follow the boulevard and you would eventually come to a Metro station. Or, he thought, ask somebody. But there was no one to ask. It was probably very busy here during the day-the men who worked at the abattoirs, the local people. But not now. Everybody had gone home.

The rue Mourette. All right, we’ll take that.

The two men came along behind him. Headed for the Metro? Well, ask them. No. But they were walking a little faster than he was, not so much, just a little. So, give them time, let them catch up, and then he could ask them if they knew where the Metro was.

He’d seen knives, once or twice. One time in particular, in Madrid, during the civil war, he could never quite forget. It had been very sudden, when it happened, or he would have looked away. But, once you saw what you saw it was too late. The idea bothered him. Too easy to imagine, to imagine what went on, just at the moment, what it would feel like.

He could hear them, back there. Their steps. That’s how quiet it was. Run.

Couldn’t quite get himself to do that. Almost, but it seemed crazy, to take off down the street. Still, he could hear them. One of them talking, low and guttural. The other one laughed. At him? Because he’d speeded up? He came to a corner, now it was the rue Guzac. Ugly name. A bad street to die on. He looked up at the windows, but they were dark. Behind him, the conversation was louder.

He crossed the street, head down, hands in pockets, and headed back where he’d come from. Toward the cafe. Easy enough to see it, earlier in the evening. Even with blackout curtains over the windows, light showed around the edges. Where was it? Had he taken another street? No, there it was, but it was dark now. Closed. Somewhere behind him, the two men crossed the street and were now walking in the same direction he was.

The man in Madrid had screamed, he had really screamed, loud. But then it was cut off sharp, because of what happened next. Serebin took his hands out of his pockets, could feel his heart hammering inside him. Why was this going to happen to him? Jean Marc. He walked faster, but it didn’t matter.

He turned a corner and started to run, then he saw a woman standing in the shadow of a doorway. Broad flat face, with lipstick and rouge, and stiff, curly hair. She wore a leather coat, had a bag on a shoulder strap. When their eyes met, she tilted her head slightly to one side, a question.

“Bonsoir,” he said.

“All alone, tonight?”

“Yes. Can we go somewhere?”

“It’s fifty francs,” she said. “Why are you breathing like that? Aren’t sick, are you?”

“No.”

“Those your pals?”

The two men waited. Felt like standing in the street and talking to each other, nothing wrong with that.

“No, it’s just me.”

“Salops,” she said. She didn’t like the type.

“Your man around?”

“Across the street. Why?”

“Let’s go see him.”

“Why? He won’t like it.”

“Oh, he’ll like it all right. Costs money, for me to get what I want.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe another girl. Maybe somebody watches it.”

“Oh.”

“All right?”

“Sure. Whatever you want, it’s only money.”

“Three hundred francs, how does that sound?”

The woman gave a sharp whistle and her pimp stepped from a doorway. About eighteen, with a cap slanted over one eye and a smart little face.

That did it, the two men started to walk away. They were very casual, just out for an evening stroll. One of them looked back over his shoulder and grinned at Serebin. We’ll see you some other time. Could they simply have intended to rob him?

The pimp was paid the three hundred francs, and all he had to watch was Serebin, disappearing down the stairway of a Metro station.

By post:

Zollweig Maschinenfabrik AG Grundelstrasse 51 Regensburg Deutsches Reich

28 February, 1941

Domnul Emil Gulian Enterprise Marasz-Gulian Strada Galati 10 Bucuresti Roumania

Dear Sir:

We are pleased to accept your offer of Reichsmarks 40,000 for two Model XIV Rheinmetall turbine steam boilers. You may have complete confidence that these have been regularly inspected and maintained to a high order and we trust you will find them in perfect working condition.

On receipt of your draft in the above-named amount, we will ship, according to your instruction, by river barge, no later than 14 March, with arrival at the port of Belgrade expected by 17 March. All export permissions and licenses will be obtained by our office.

We wish you success in your new venture and, should you have further inquiries, please address them to me personally.

Most respectfully yours, Albert Krempf Managing Director Zollweig Maschinenfabrik AG

A Vidocq/Lille steam turbine was available in Bratislava, manufactured in 1931, rated at 10,000 kilowatts of power delivered, 33 feet in length, 13 feet wide, 11 feet high, weighing 237,000 pounds. The Czech manager of the foundry guaranteed performance, documentation, and shipping. And well he should, Polanyi thought, at the price they were paying. Polanyi wondered how they would go about replacing it, with the war using up production capacity at an astonishing rate, but that wasn’t his problem. Maybe it was a backup system, maybe this, maybe that-in the event, the opportunity was too good to pass up and no doubt they had something in mind.

As in Budapest, where agents for Marasz-Gulian located three turbine boilers, of similar dimension, with one old fellow, formerly the pride of the Esztergom Power Authority, weighing in at “over four hundred thousand pounds.” They rather thought. And rescued, just in time, from the scrapyard.

“Let’s see them haul that great fucker off the bottom,” Stephens said, at the restaurant overlooking the wharves. He handed Polanyi a page cut from an old Hungarian catalogue. A photograph of a giant turbine. A little man with a mustache, wearing a gray uniform, stood beside it, dwarfed by its size. “From London, by diplomatic pouch,” Stephens explained. Then added, wistfully, “Such strange and lovely things they have in London.”

Six turbines, then, with a seventh available in Belgrade, from a Serbian steel mill. “Fourteen years old and no longer suitable to our needs, but perfectly reliable.” The decision to use steam turbines, a race of giants in the Land of Industry, had come after some consideration. Bagged cement would break loose from its load and tumble away in the current long before it turned to concrete, and there was no credible reason to ship concrete block to Roumania, where some of it, at least, was manufactured. Similarly, fire brick for blast furnaces, which weighed, as it happened, substantially less than common brick. “And locomotives,” Stephens had said, “are, alas, far too likely to be traveling by rail.” Scrap iron was currently in demand for German tanks, stone was quarried in Roumania. “The world is lighter than one thinks,” Polanyi grumbled, poking at his eggplant.

And the cursed river could never really decide how deep it was, they found. Still, everyone, Herr Doktor Finkelheim, the Roumanian pilot, and specialists at universities in Birmingham and Leeds, agreed that the Stenka ridge was the place. Kilometer 1030. Dangerously shallow at the end of winter, before the spring rains left the river swollen and high in its banks. So, a barge with six feet of draft and six feet above the waterline, crowned with an eleven-foot-high turbine, would come to rest at twenty-three feet. A menace to navigation. Even if, in the course of the accident, one of the barges turned on its side-disaster! — they’d have six more down there, pulled under by the sinking tug. A great navigational mess, surely, but an expensive one to arrange.

“Don’t worry about that,” Stephens said. The Special Operations Executive had a considerable imprest from Treasury, and he was, for the time being, their fair-haired boy.

It was Ibrahim who was sent to Bucharest to meet with Gulian. “Stenka ridge,” he said. “No question. An Austrian company dredges the ship canal and, in the present state of politics, now more than ever. They are always at it.” As for the appropriate cargo, Gulian shrugged and said, “Well, a steam boiler.” He laughed. “If what you want is sheer clumsiness, the most frustrating beast you could imagine, that’s the steam boiler. Monsters, those things, ask your local industrialist.”

Bought new?

“No, impossible. They take months to order, to build, to deliver-a cauchemar. ”

Then?

“In all commerce there are shadow markets, informal dealings between buyer and seller. In all products, machinery as much as any other. I can think of at least two agencies who work this area. And the war has made no difference to them-believe me, they prosper in war. They live on the margin, these men. Hang around your outer office, read the newspaper, discuss the day’s events with your secretary. There used to be one-Brugger, was that it? Always with a toothpick in the mouth. He’d wait for me to go out for lunch. Hello, how are you, heard the one about the plumber and the midget? Want to buy something? Got anything you want to sell? Truth is, you don’t need them, until you need them, and then you really need them.”

So then, who will actually buy the turbines?

“That’s a problem. A paper company won’t work, because the people who watch these things-import licenses and so forth-are not stupid. ‘XYZ,’ they’ll say, ‘who’s that?’ Which means, if you don’t have months to build up a shell business, you’ll need the real thing. So, it’s either me, or someone like me.”

And what happens after the “accident”?

“Delay, temporize, misunderstand, deny, pull your hair out, declare bankruptcy, then run like hell. After all, what makes you think that what works in business won’t work in war?”

Yes, but there’s no history of Gulian, doing things like that.

True. “But go see my enemies, they’ll tell you they always knew it would come to that. So, finally, they’ll be right.”

A lot of enemies, were there?

“I’m rich and successful,” Gulian said. “You fill in the rest.”

So, through various banks, in Geneva and Lisbon, the money began to move.

28 February. At the IRU office, a quiet morning. On the radio, an endless suite and variations for guitar, accompanied, now and then, by the rattle of a newspaper, and an occasional, mournful, ping from the tepid radiator, remembering better days. In the window, a lead-colored sky. Serebin dropped by that morning because he had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. This was called, in the parlance of the clandestine world, waiting. He needed urgently to speak with Polanyi-to tell him what had happened at the cafe by the abattoirs, to warn him, perhaps, of a dangerous change of heart, or to be scoffed at, gently, for seeing things that weren’t there. But, short of an emergency wire to Helikon Trading, there was nothing he could do. He’d been left in Paris, awaiting assignment, dangling. Had the operation been, for whatever reason, canceled? Maybe. And the way he would be told about it was-silence. No further contact. Would Polanyi do that? Yes, that was precisely what he would do. That was, he suspected, the traditional, the classical, way it was done.

He considered the wire. Wrote and rewrote it in the Aesopian language they used, oblique and commonplace- representative important principal currently unwilling to proceed. In other words, the bastard tried to kill me. No, it wouldn’t work. Or, worse, it would work, and stop everything cold for no good reason.

He spent the morning pretending to be busy, seated in front of a stack of problem papers-letters to be answered, forms to be filled out-that he shared with Boris Ulzhen, but mostly thinking about things that were bad for him to think about. Then the telephone rang, and a man called out, “Ilya Aleksandrovich? A call for you.”

“Who is it?”

After a moment, the man said, “Madame Orlov.”

The name meant nothing- another lost soul. Serebin hesitated, he was tired of the world, of people who wanted things. Finally, he lost the battle with his conscience and walked over to the desk. “Yes?” he said. “Madame Orlov?”

“Hello, ours. ”

Four-thirty, she’d said.

But by five-thirty she still wasn’t there. Serebin waited, looked at his watch and waited. Sometimes he stared out the window, at people passing by on the street in front of the hotel. Sometimes he tried to read, gave up, walked around the room, went back to the window. So she’s late, he told himself, women do that in love affairs, it’s nothing new. But this was an occupied city, and sometimes people didn’t show up when they said they would. Sometimes, it turned out, they’d had to stand on line at a passport controle, and sometimes they were taken away to be questioned. And, sometimes, they just disappeared.

Then, after six, he heard footsteps in the hallway, almost running, and waited by the door until she knocked. She was breathless and cold, said she was sorry to be so late, put a chilled glove on his cheek and, eyes closed, lips apart, waited for him to kiss her. He started to, then didn’t. Instead, from the curve between her neck and shoulder he inhaled a great, deep breath of her-perfume, plain soap, the scent of her skin, and, when he exhaled, it was audible; half growl, half sigh, a dog by a fire.

She knew what that meant. Held him tight for a moment, then said “God, it’s freezing in here,” and ran for the bed, shedding her coat and kicking her shoes off on the way, burrowing under the covers and pulling them up to her nose. He sat beside her, and she gave him her jacket and skirt, then her sweater and slip. A brief struggle beneath the blanket produced first an oath, then a stocking.

“How long?” he said.

She handed him a second stocking. “The weekend. Labonniere’s in Vichy, at the foreign ministry. So…”

“Are you…is it work? For us?”

She wriggled briefly beneath the covers and gave him a garter belt. “No, love, it isn’t.” She unhooked her bra, put it on his lap with everything else, then slid her panties off, reached out from her den and, turning them upside down, pulled them over his head.

“I dread going back there,” she said later. They were warm beneath the snarled covers, the room dark, the city silent. “Awful place, the Trieste. One of those border towns where everybody’s got it in for everybody else.”

“It’s not forever,” he said.

“Mean and dreary, and it rains.”

“But”-he paused-“you have to stay.”

She yawned and stretched, pulled the blankets around them. “Don’t tempt me, ours. Really, don’t.” He had the BBC on the radio, tuned low for caution-it was against occupation law to listen to it-and a tiny symphony played away on the night table. “I’ve convinced myself that it matters, what I do there.” She didn’t sound convinced. “Salon intelligence, so-called. Poor Madame X, how she pines for her friend, the Minister of Y, off in frigid Moscow for a week. Labonniere’s pretty good at it.”

“You’re careful, of course.”

“Oh yes, very. But…”

She didn’t like talking about it, didn’t want it in bed with them. She traced a finger down his back, began, lazily, to make love to him.

“Maybe better, in the spring.”

She put a finger to his lips.

“Sorry.”

She rolled delicately over on top of him so that her mouth was close to his ear and said, in a voice so quiet he could only just hear her, “We will survive this, ours, and then we will go away together.”

Only when morning came and they were dressed could he bring himself to tell her what happened at the cafe. “Strange,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I don’t like saying this, but, if they’d really wanted to do something, they could have done it.”

“I know.”

“Maybe they were just trying to frighten you. A warning.”

“Maybe. Still, whatever it was, Polanyi should hear about it.”

“I can manage that,” she said, “when I get back.” She put on her coat, they were going out for coffee. “By now, you know, Polanyi and the people he works for, and the people they work for, have all got themselves committed to this.”

For a moment, they were silent.

“So,” she said, “it’s too late to stop.”

Very unwise to be seen together at the Gare de Lyon but he wouldn’t let her leave him at the hotel. They looked for a taxi, but there was none to be found, so they leaned against each other on the Metro, then got off a stop before the station, found a cafe, held hands across the table, and said good-bye.

20 March. The parks still brown and dead, branches bare and dripping, rain cold, light gone in late afternoon, and hours and hours until the dawn. Yes, the last days of winter, the calendar didn’t lie, but up here it died hard and took a long time doing it. On the Pont Royal, the emigre writer I. A. Serebin leaned on a balustrade and stared pensively down into the Seine.

Writing lines on a reluctant spring? Lines for a lover in a distant city? The river was flat, and low in its banks, it barely moved. Or was it, perhaps, just beginning to swell, just beginning to grow, from thawed fields and hillsides in the south? He couldn’t tell, didn’t know, was ignorant of water. All those years of idle staring at the stuff, the very essence of everything, and he knew nothing about it. Nonetheless, he studied the river and tried to read it because, if the spring tide had started to run here, it was running also at another river, south and east of here, at the Stenka ridge, at kilometer 1030. Certain individuals, in Istanbul and London, had to be gazing at their own rivers, he suspected. So then, where were they?

He needn’t have worried.

When he left the bridge he walked over to the IRU office, then, eventually, back to the Winchester, and then, as was his custom, to a small restaurant in the quarter, where his ration coupons allowed him a bowl of thin stew, turnips and onions and a few shreds of meat, and a piece of mealy gray bread. Which he ate while reading a newspaper, folded by his bowl, to keep him company. He moved quickly past the political news-Hitler had issued an ultimatum to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia-to “The Inquiring Reporter.” Yesterday, our question was for men with long beards: Sir, do you sleep with your beard on top of the blanket, or beneath it?

“Monsieur?”

Serebin looked up to see a woman in a black kerchief and coat. A plain soul, small and compact, unremarkable.

“All the tables are taken, would you mind terribly if I joined you?”

Why no, he didn’t mind. All the tables were not taken, but why fret over details. She ordered a small flask of wine and the stew-there was nothing else on the blackboard-handing over her own coupons. And, when the waiter left, said, “I believe we have a friend in common, in Istanbul.”

In the valley between winter and spring, old friends often reappeared. Maybe chance, or the stars, or ancient human something, but, whatever the reason, it was especially so that year. Helmut Bach, for instance, had left two messages at the IRU, the first week in March, and two more at Serebin’s hotel, the second a brief note. Where was Serebin? Bach very much wanted to see him, they had some things to talk over. So, please get in touch. At this number, or at this one-the protocol office of the German administration-he was sure to get the message.

Des choses a discuter. A German writing in French to a Russian-what couldn’t go wrong! But friends-even “friends,” a cloaked term for a cloaked relationship-did not have “things to talk over.” That was a threat. A warm little threat, maybe, but a threat nonetheless. Bach had invested time and concentration on him, now it had to pay off. The moment had come, was, likely, past due, for Serebin to give the occupation authority what it wanted-“a talk,” or appearance at a cultural event, whatever might imply approval of the new German Europe.

That was to look on the bright side.

Because it did occur to Serebin that these affections from his German pal might have been provoked by the same source that had sent Jean Marc to buy him drinks. Not a direct denunciation to the Gestapo, merely a word with a diplomat or an urbane, sympathetic Abwehr officer. Because this wasn’t force majeure, this was its close cousin, pressure. Which meant, to Serebin, that the unseen hand-mailed fist in a velvet glove-was, for some complex reason, working cautiously.

He thought.

Polanyi’s courier had left him a perfect set of documents for departure from Paris on 25 March. A new name-a Russian name, and a new job: director of the Paris office of a Roumanian company, Enterprise Marasz-Gulian, who was approved for travel to Belgrade, on business, via first-class wagon-lit. This meant two things: Serebin did not have to apply for permission to leave the occupied city-it crossed his mind that they might well be waiting for him, at that office-and, with his train leaving in four days, he could probably avoid responding to Helmut Bach.

Four days. And premonitions. He found himself taking inventory of his life at the Winchester, his life in Paris. Poking through notes and sketches for unwritten work, addresses and telephone numbers, books, letters. He’d known, when the Germans had marched into Paris nine months earlier, that he might not stay there forever. So he’d been rather Parisian about the occupation; try a day of it, see if you survive, then try another. Sooner or later, the French told each other, they’ll go away, because they always did. And he’d imagined that, if it happened that he was the one who had to leave, he would be able to make a civilized exit.

But now he had a bad feeling. Clearly, Bach, which meant the Third Reich, was not going to leave him in peace, they were going to make him pay to live in their city. So, as the French put it, fini. That was that. He found himself anxious to see, one last time, certain places; streets he liked, gardens, alleys, a few secret corners of the city where its medieval heart still beat. It would be a long time before he saw them again.

Two sad days. The photograph of Annette, Mai ’38 scrawled on the back, taken in the garden of a house by the sea. A print dress, a pained smile- why must you take my picture? A letter from Warsaw, dated August of ’39, mailed just before the invasion by a Polish friend from Odessa. A photograph of his father as a young man, hair like brushed wheat, standing stiffly beside an older, unknown, woman. The only picture of him that survived. Put it all in a box and find a place to hide it. He almost did that-he found a good box, from a stationery store, but he was too late.

When he entered the lobby of the Winchester, just after seven, box in hand, the clerk beckoned to him. This was the same clerk, an old man with white hair, who had watched as he’d led Kubalsky upstairs. Now, when Serebin reached the desk, he said, “Ah monsieur, some good news for you.”

“Yes?”

The other clerk behind the desk, a heavy man with a dark, lustrous pompadour who kept the hotel books, looked up attentively, it was always interesting to hear about good news.

“Madame at the cremerie — in the rue Mabillon? Has a grand Cantal. If you go over there you can still get some.”

Serebin thanked him. Nothing like this had ever happened before, but the French character was dependably eccentric and sudden changes of weather were no surprise. He started to turn away from the desk, headed up to his room, when the man grabbed him by the wrist.

“Now, monsieur. Right away. For the Cantal.” The clerk’s hand was gripping him so hard it trembled.

Serebin went cold. The envelope from the courier was in the inside pocket of his jacket. To carry two identities was a cardinal sin of clandestine practice, but Serebin had meant to hide the envelope at the IRU office.

“Now, please.” A glance and a nod at the ceiling — they’re up in your room.

A few feet away, the bookkeeper put his hand on the telephone-the one used to call the rooms. The clerk saw him do it, turned toward him, and, for a long time, the two men stared at each other. This was nothing less than a struggle for Serebin’s life, and Serebin knew it. A fierce, silent struggle, no sound in the lobby, not a word spoken out loud. Finally, the bookkeeper cleared his throat, a small self-conscious gesture, and took his hand off the phone.

“I’ll show you where it is,” the clerk said. “The cremerie. ” He let go of Serebin’s wrist and walked around the end of the desk. Turning to the bookkeeper, he said, “Keep an eye on things, will you?” Then added, “Monsieur Henri.” His first name, spoken in a normal tone of voice, dry and pleasant, but there was anathema in it, clear as a bell.

The clerk took Serebin by the elbow-he’d fought for this prize and he wasn’t going to let it get away-and walked him to a door that led off the lobby and down a stairway to the cellar of the hotel. This was bravado, Serebin thought, profoundly French bravado. The old man knew the bookkeeper wouldn’t pick up the phone once he’d left, and so virtually dared him to do it.

At the foot of the stairs, a dark passage, past ruined furniture and abandoned trunks, past carriage-horse harness and a rack of unlabeled wine bottles sealed with wax, the Winchester’s private history. Another stairway led up to street level and a heavy door. The clerk took a ring of keys from his pocket, asked Serebin to light a match, finally found the right one, and opened the door.

Outside, an alley. Serebin could see a street at the far end.

“Take care, monsieur,” the clerk said to him.

“Who were they?”

A Gallic gesture-shoulders, face, hands. Meaning who knows, to begin with, but more than that: they are who they always are. “Three of them, not in uniform. One in your room. Two nearby.”

“Well, thank you, my friend.”

“Je vous en prie, monsieur.” My pleasure.

He was at Anya Zak’s apartment an hour later. He’d gone first to Ulzhen, but the concierge said they were out for the evening. “So,” she said, when she opened the door, “now you see the truth.” The real Anya. Who wore two heavy nightgowns, a pair of French army socks, and wool gloves, one green, the other gray.

Serebin sat on the couch, the empty box on his lap. Anya Zak stood over a hot plate and began to boil water for tea.

“I should tell you,” he said, “that I am a fugitive.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

“Really. What have you done?”

“Nothing much.”

“Well, whatever it is, I hope it’s very bad. Reprehensible.”

“Can I stay here, Anya?”

She nodded yes, and measured out tea from a canister as she waited for the water to boil. “There are people, you know, who say you do things.”

“People are wrong.”

“Are they? Well, even so, I’m proud of you.”

He slept on the couch, under his overcoat-she insisted he take the blanket but he wouldn’t. Neither of them really slept. They talked in the darkness, once the lights were out, about countries and cities, about what had happened to people they knew. Then he thought she’d fallen asleep. But he could see her shape beneath the covers, restless, moving around, turning over. At one point, when it was very late, she whispered, “Are you asleep?” He almost answered, then didn’t, and breathed as though he were.