City of Thieves

26

Officers in uniform and stern-faced civilians hurried in and out of the mansion on Kamenny Island, shoving through the front door beneath the white-columned portico. Behind the old house the Neva lay coiled, frozen and dusted with snow, a white snake slithering through the broken city.

The bald lieutenant escorted me to one of the machine-gun emplacements in front of the mansion, where a band of soldiers sat behind stacked sandbags, sipping weak tea from tin cups. The sergeant in charge read the colonel’s letter, glanced at me, and said, “You have something for him?”

I nodded and he beckoned for me to follow him. The lieutenant turned and walked away, never looking back, eager to escape what had turned into an unfortunate morning for him.

We finally found Grechko downstairs in the mansion’s wine cellar. All the grand old bottles of wine had been drunk long ago, but the walls were still honeycombed with terra-cotta racks. The colonel stood beside one of his subordinate officers, who checked items off a list. Young soldiers opened wood crates with crowbars. They dipped their arms into the shredded paper protecting the contents, pulling out tins and jars and burlap sacks and calling out the contents.

“Two kilos of smoked ham.”

“Five hundred grams of black caviar.”

“Kilo of jellied beef.”

“Garlic and onions… no weight listed.”

“Kilo of white sugar.”

“Kilo salted herring.”

“Boiled tongue, no weight listed.”

For a minute I stood and watched as the pile of foodstuffs grew, all the ingredients for a legendary feast. Carrots and potatoes, plucked chickens and jars of sour cream, wheat flour, honey, strawberry jam, jugs of fermented cherry juice, canned borovik mushrooms, blocks of butter wrapped in wax paper, a two-hundred-gram bar of Swiss chocolate.

The sergeant escorting me whispered a word to the officer standing beside Grechko. The colonel heard him and turned my way. For a few seconds he frowned, unable to place me, the deep furrows splitting his forehead.

“Ah,” he said, his strange, beautiful smile emerging. “The looter! Where’s your friend, the deserter?”

I don’t know how my face reacted to this question, but the colonel saw and understood.

“Too bad,” he said. “I liked that boy.”

He waited for me to do something and for a long count I couldn’t remember why I was there. When it came back to me, I unbuttoned my coat, pulled the slatted, straw-stuffed box out from under my sweater, and handed it over.

“A dozen eggs,” I told him.

“Wonderful, wonderful.” He gave the box to his underling without looking at it and gestured to the delicacies heaped on the stone floor. “Airlifted some provisions in last night. Just in time. You know how many owed favors I had to spend on this wedding?”

The subordinate officer handed the egg box to one of the young soldiers and made a mark in his book. “Another dozen eggs.”

I watched the soldier walk away with the box.

“You already have eggs?”

The subordinate checked his book. “That’s four dozen now.”

“The more the better,” said the colonel. “Now we can make fish pies. Here, give the boy a Grade One ration card. Ah, give him two; he might as well have his friend’s.”

The subordinate raised his eyebrows, impressed with this generosity. He pulled two ration cards from a leather wallet and signed them. He took an inkpad from his pocket and stamped the cards before handing them to me.

“You’ll be a popular boy,” he said.

I stared at the cards in my hand. Each one entitled me to an officer’s rations. I looked around the cellar. Kolya would have known which vineyards the Dolgorukovs preferred, the white they chose for sturgeon, the red best paired with venison. Or if he didn’t know, he would have made it up. I watched soldiers walk upstairs carrying sacks of rice and long strings of fat sausage.

When I turned toward the colonel, he stared right back at me. Again he understood my expression.

“Those words you want to say right now? Don’t say them.” He smiled and cuffed my cheek with something close to real affection. “And that, my friend, is the secret to living a long life.”