Night Soldiers

In the Guadarrama, Thursday had come to be known as D�de las Esposas, Wives' Day, in the course of which the guerrilla bandof Lieutenant Kulic did those chores that, in normal times, would have fallen within the province of their wives--excepting, of course, the happiest chore of all, which would have to await their return to home and the marriage bed. They shook out and aired their blankets, sand-scrubbed the cooking utensils, washed their clothing and hung it in the trees to dry, and for the grandf�lewashed themselves--swearing a blue streak in the icy mountain water and splashing each other with childish glee. Kulic's time in the Serbian mountains had taught him the critical importance of domesticity in the contexto�rtisanoperations. Being dirty and uncared for, men quickly lost respect for discipline, and operations suffered accordingly. As Kulic phrased it to himself, the more you lived in a cave, the less caveman behavior could be tolerated. They had found the deserted village quite by accident, but it was perfect for a guerrilla base: no road led there, the approaches were well covered by dense tangles of underbrush, and it lay high enough in the mountains that radio communication with Madrid Base could be maintained on a more or less regular basis. There was not much left of the village: a few huts--all but three open to the stars--built of dry-masoned stone native to the mountains. They often speculated about the place--perhaps it had been the home of the early Visigoths, western Goths, who had populated Spain in ancient times. It was not difficult to imagine. They would have hunted bear and wild pig in the mountain forests, with spears and dogs, and worn wolf pelts against the weather. Or perhaps another race, unrecorded and unremembered, had died out in the village, the last survivors wandering down onto the plains to become part of other tribes. In any case, with time the piled stone walls and weedy vines had achieved a harmonious truce, leaving the village a sort of garden gone wild and an excellent hideout. On the Thursday following the destruction of the Nationalist armory, while most of the band was occupied with housekeeping, there was a small commotion at the perimeter of the camp. Kulic, walking down the hill to see what the shouting was about, found his two sentries with rifles pointed at Maltsaev, the political officer from the Madrid embassy. He was a dark, balding young man with bad skin and a sourdisposition, a man much given to sinister affectations. He wore tinted eyeglasses and a straw hat with top creased and brim turned down, and spoke always as though he were saying only a small fraction of what he actually knew. He had arrived alone, on horseback, having left his car in the last village before the mountains, some twenty kilometers distant. Thus it was immediately apparent to Kulic that this was anything but a casual visit. To protect his city clothing during the journey, Maltsaev had worn an immense gray duster coat, which, with the hat and glasses, gave him the look of a Parisian _artiste__ of the 1890s. An appearance so strange that Kulic was a little surprised his lookouts had not dispatched him on the spot. They sat together on a fallen pine log at the edge of a small outcrop above the village. From there, they could watch the guerrilla band shaking blankets and capering in the stream, and strident voices--cursing, laughing, joking--rose to them. This was Kulic's thinking place. When the sun came out, the scent of pine resin filled the air and blue martins sang in the trees. "You don't have it so bad," Maltsaev said, looking about him. "It is D�de las Esposastoday,"Kulicanswered, taking off his peaked cap and smoothing his hair. "We rest and gather our strength. It is a little different when we fight." "One would suppose so. Now look here, Kulic, I won't beat about the bush with you. My mission is not a happy one." "It's a long ride up here." "Too long," Maltsaev said ruefully. "And I'm a city boy, a'Musco-vite, I admit it." He took off his left shoe and pulled the laces apart. From the pocket of his duster coat he produced a razor blade and began cutting open the leather tongue, finally revealing a yellow slip of paper. "And I had to come through the fascist lines," he added, in explanation. "A nervous time for you, then," Kulic remarked. "Yes. And I am unappreciated," Maltsaev said. "My poor backside has no business on a horse." He handed the paper to Kulic, then pressed the layers of the shoe tongue back together again as best he could. "Of course," he said, almost to himself, "one may not carry glue." Kulic noted that he wore fine silk socks. "What's this?" Kulic asked, studying the paper. There were four names on it. Four of his men. "We have discovered a plot," Maltsaev said. "Another plot? Shit on your plots, Maltsaev, these men are not Falangistas."He thrust the paper back at Maltsaev, who was busy putting on his shoe and declined to take it. "Nobody said they were, and please don't swear at me. Give me a chance, will you. You field commanders have short fuses. A little bad news--and boom!" "Boom is what it will be," Kulic said. "Shoot me, comrade, by all means. There'll be ten more tomorrow, Spetsburo types, Ukrainians--just try reasoning with them." "Very well, Maltsaev. Say your piece and ride away." "If that's how you want it. These four are members of POUM--there's no question about it, we have copies of the lists, right from Durruti himself." "Durruti? The anarchist leader? He claims these men?" "Well, from his office." "And so?" Maltsaev made his hand into a pistol--bent thumb the hammer, extended index finger the barrel--then pulled the trigger with his middle finger. "Are you insane? Is Madrid? Moscow? These men are fighters, soldiers. You don't execute your own soldiers. Only for cowardice. And these are not cowards. They've stood up to gunfire, which is more than I can say for some people." "Yes, yes. I'm a coward, please do abuse me, I don't mind. But you must take care of the problem--that's an order from Madrid." "Marquin, the second name on this list, climbed to the roof of a convent and poured gasoline down the chimney, which enabled us to blow up a Falangist armory. Is this the behavior of a traitor? Besides, all these men are of the UGT, not the POUM." "Kulic. . . no, _Lieutenant__ Kulic, you've been given an order. Have a trial if you like--just make sure it comes out right. The sad fact is that the POUM--Trotskyites, to give them their proper name--are fouling up this war. Sometimes they refuse to fight. They won't take orders. They roam about like a herd of wild asses and cause everybody trouble. Generalissimo Stalin has determined to purify the Spanish effort, and Director Yezhov has ordered that the POUM be purged. These four men claim UGT association, but their names appear on POUM membership lists obtained by our operatives in Barcelona." "You're ruining me--you know that, don't you?" "Four men amount to nothing." "You believe the other sixteen, having witnessed their comrades' unjust executions, will fight on?" Maltsaev thought about that for a time, studying the ground, pushing a pebble around with the toe of his shoe. "Your point has merit," he said. Then he brightened. "One could report, ahh, yes, well one could report that the disease has spread throughout the group, and it was determined to be of no further operational use. I could try that, Kulic, if it would help you. They would transfer you elsewhere, but your record would be clean at least. Better than clean, now that I think about it. Fervor. That's what it would show. It's just the sort of thing Yezhov likes, you know, going it one better." Kulic stared down the hill at his men. A word to Maltsaev and they'd all be dead. Julio Marquin, the spiderlike little shipfitter who'd climbed the convent drainpipe, was poking at a pot of rice over a bed of coals. They cooked by day--there could be no fires at night in the Guadarrama. The fool! Why had he gone and gotten his name on the wrong list? He despaired of the Spaniards, their instinct for survival had been eaten alive by their political passions. The Spanish Legion, under Yag�d a regimental hymn announcing to the world that their bride was death, and the Republican side was no better. Thus they slaughtered each other. What did it matter if four of them went to heaven early? His own pride was in his way, surely. How he protected his men. Took every care to protect them, to keep them from getting hurt. He recalled, suddenly, that he'd killed his first man when he was fifteen, in a tavern brawl in Zvornik. Such strength and determination it had taken to do that. Where was it now? "Well," Maltsaev said, "how shall it be?" "The best time," he took a deep breath, "is during battle. All sorts of things happen. It could not be arranged for all four at once, of course, but over time, in a few weeks say, they would be honorably slain in action against the enemy." "I'm sorry. I appreciate your thinking, but it just won't do." "Who gave this order, Maltsaev?" "I can't tell you that and you know it." "Then you do it." "Me? I'm a political officer. I don't shoot anybody." He took off his straw hat and examined the inside of the crown; the leather band was sweatstained and he blew on it to dry it out. Kulic knew he was trapped. He wanted to cut Maltsaev's throat. But then they would all die. The Ukrainians would come and, once they arrived, all the talking was over. So it was four now, or twenty-one tomorrow. He stood up. "Sergeant Delgado,"he called. Delgadostood up naked in the stream. He was a boilermaker by profession, a man in his forties. His arms and neck were burned by the sun, the rest of his body was white. "Yes, comrade?" the sergeant called up the hill. "I need a patrol of four men," he answered in his rough Spanish. He called out their names. "To gather wood," he added. "We have plenty of wood," the sergeant responded. "Sergeant!" Kulic yelled. Nodding to himself that officers were crazy, Delgadopicked his way delicately among the rocks in the streambed and went off to gather the patrol. Maltsaev was finished blowing on his hat. "You'll see," he said, "everything will work out for the best." He put the hat back on, carefully adjusting the angle of the brim so that his eyes were shaded from the sun. They went up the mountain to gather firewood. Kulic was armed with his pistol and, slung over his shoulder, a Spanish bolt-action Mauser rifle, the basic weapon of the Spanish war. The four men were not armed, the better to carry the wood. They chattered among themselves, liking their holiday, drawing pleasure from the work detail. Now and then they looked over their shoulders at Kulic, but he waved them on. At last he found what he was looking for. A small glade, an utterly peaceful place where no people had been for a long time. They began to gather wood, snapping dead limbs off fallen trees, bundling up twigs and sticks for kindling. They workedfor an hour, tying the wood with hempen cords in such a way that it could be harnessed to their shoulders, leaving their hands free. It was the way he had taught them to do it. He knew, also, that once they were laden in this way, it would be nearly impossible for them to rush him successfully. When they were ready to go, he held up a hand and unslung the rifle, holding it loosely at port arms. They stood there for what seemed like a long time, watching him, their faces slowly growing puzzled. One of them finally said,"Capit�"--a term of honor they had granted him. "I am sorry," Kulic said, "but I must ask you to sit down for a moment." Carefully they knelt, balancing their loads, then sat, lying back against the wood bundles. "I am told, by the Russian who came to the camp this afternoon, that you are members of the organization known as POUM, an anarchist group. Is this true?" "Our politics are complicated," Marquin answered, making himself spokesman for the group. "We are members of the UGT, the Communist party, but we have all attended meetings of the POUM in order to hear the thoughts of comrade Durruti, who is a greatly gifted man and a fine orator. 'If you are victorious,' he has said to us, 'you will be sitting on a pile of ruins. But we have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. . . and it is we who built the palaces and the cities, and we are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth. The bourgeoisie may blast and ruin their world before they leave the stage of history. But we carry a new world in our hearts.'" Kulic was impressed with the speech. "You can remember all tfiat?" "All that and more. So many of us do not read or write, you see, that memory must serve us." "But you are not members." "No, but we do not disavow them. They too are our brothers in this struggle. We attended their meetings, before we came out here to fight the fascists, gave thema _gordo__for the coffee, signed petitions in favor of freedom for the working classes. Can this have been wrong?" "I am afraid so." Sitting next to Marquin was a fat man. How he had managed to remain so, despite forced marches and the unending physical demands of _partisan__ life, Kulic had never been able to figure out. He had, when he spoke, the piping voice of a fat man. "Then we are to be shot," he said. Kulic nodded yes. Two of the men crossed themselves. Marquin said, "We are ready to die, it is in the nature of this work we do. But to die dishonored, by the hand of our leader..."The pause became a silence as he realized that nothing he could think of would finish the thought. "You are not dishonored, and I myself do not understand this, and I do not agree. I am, like you, a soldier, and I have been given an order, and because I am a good soldier, I will carry out that order even though I believe it is wrong. All I know is that we are involved in a great revolution. It began a long time ago, far from here, and it will go on for a long time after we are gone. The POUM is in the way, it would-seem, of victory in Spain. A sacrifice will have to be made. That is everything I can say." One of the men struggled suddenly to get up but the wood borne by his shoulders held him back, and the fat man, seated next to him, put a hand on his shoulder, making it impossible for him to move. "No, no," the fat man said, "let it be. Our enemy is not in this place." Marquin spoke up, his voice absolutely calm. "I wish to be the first," he said, "but I want to stand up." He wrestled the load of wood from his shoulders and stood. Straightened his _mono__ overall so it hung properly, combed his hair into place with his fingers as though his photograph were about to be taken. His eyes looked directly into Kulic's. Kulic worked the bolt on the rifle and brought it to his shoulder, sighting on the man's heart. He had never known the name of the man in the tavern in Zvornik--that had all happened too quickly for any but a perfectly instinctive reaction. The man had rushed at him with a piece of wood, Kulic had plunged a knife into the very center of him, he had seemed to swell up suddenly to the size of a giant, then twisted away, wrenching the knife from Kulic's hand and falling upon it so that thesteel hilt banged against the cement floor. After that there was only the sound of the last breath rushing from his lungs. Kulic tightened his finger on the trigger. The Spanish Mauser was a simple weapon, made to work for a long time, and there was nothing delicate about its mechanism. The trigger was on a hard spring and it had to be pulled with force. Slowly, Kulic lowered the rifle. He forced the bolt back and, as the ejected cartridge spun into the air, caught it cleverly in his right hand. Then he put it in his pocket. Slowly at first, and then more rapidly as they understood what was happening, the other three men unburdened themselves and stood up. Kulic nodded his head toward the west. "Portugal is that way, I believe." "But we have no guns," one of the men said. "You will draw less attention without them," Kulic said. He was not to hear Marquin speak again. The man studied him as his friends walked slowly west along the curve of the mountainside. There was no gratitude in his eyes. Perhaps a veiled smile, perhaps the faintest hint of contempt. It occurred to Kulic then that Maltsaev might have been right in ways he had not understood, but it was much too late to have thoughts like that so he turned his attention to other matters. He waited until he could no longer hear the departing men and, when the forest was again silent, waited another twenty minutes, sitting with his back against a tree and smoking a cigarette. He enjoyed the cigarette immensely. When it was finished, he took the clasp knife from his pocket, used it, then put the cartridge back in the rifle, stood up, and fired into the air. This act he repeated three more times. His remaining men could make a small but important difference behind the lines in this war, but they could not keep a secret. As the echo of the final shot rang away down the side of the mountain, he shouldered the rifle and headed for the camp. Looking back for a moment, he saw four bundles of well-bound firewood arranged in a line in the middle of a clearing. Whoever might chance to come this way would find them and think himself lucky that day. In all likelihood, he would make no sense at all of the Cyrillic letters and numerals carved into the trunk of a pine tree.??825.

At five in the morning, Khristo made his way to the Citroen, parked in front of the hotel. Across the street, the _Neva's__ stacks showed curls of dark smoke as the boiler room got up steam for the6:30departure. He had not really slept--Yaschyeritsa's face and voice hammered against his consciousness all night long--and had climbed out of bed in the last hour of darkness with a sick stomach and hot, sandy eyes. At the car, the new sublieutenant awaited him, sitting at attention behind the wheel. "Good day to you, Lieutenant Stoianev. Allow me please to introduce myself. I am Sublieutenant Lubin, reporting for duty." It was rehearsed and formal, a squeaky little whine of a voice. Khristo took a step backward and stared at the boy in the car. He had the face of a malevolent baby--a grossly overfed baby--with rat-colored hair combed and pomaded to a stiff pompadour that rose above his glossy forehead and tiny china-blue eyes. A mama's boy, Khristo thought, perhaps seventeen, who would sit on Yaschyeritsa's knee and tattle at every opportunity. "Yes, hello," Khristo managed. "Usually I drive," he added. "Begging your pardon, Lieutenant Stoianev, but I have been instructed, by Colonel General Bloch, that as junior officer it is my duty to drive the car. Let me assure you that I have been trained extensively in the proper driving of automobiles." At a steady twenty-five miles per hour they left Tarragona at dawn, Lubin holding the wheel with both hands and driving like a puppet, correcting--Khristo counted spitefully--eight times in a single slow curve. They would be all day getting to Madrid. "Stoianev. I believe that is a Bulgarian name?" Lubin said. "Yes. I am Bulgarian." "Then you will not have heard of my family. My father is associate director of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Leonid Trofimo-vich Lubin is his name. Is it known to you?" "No," Khristo said, "I don't know it." "It is not important." As Khristo stared glassily ahead at the endless road, however, he did recall something of the All Soviet Institute of Agronomy. Saschahad one evening told him the story of one of its most prominent members, O. A. Yanata, the Ukrainian botanist who had set up the first chair of botany at the Academy of Sciences. He had proposed to the academy that certain chemicals could beused for the destruction of weeds. This was an entirely new concept, since the only known method to date was continual use of the hoe. A lengthy political investigation of Yanata was instituted, at the end of which he was accused of attempting to destroy all the harvests of the Soviet Union by the use of chemicals and was subsequently tried and shot. At the end of an hour, Lubin pulled to the side of the road and stopped. He got out of the car, walked around it three times, then returned and drove away. "Why did you do that?" Khristo asked. "A rule of driving, Lieutenant," Lubin answered proudly. "To maintain concentration, one must dismount the vehicle hourly and exercise lightly." Khristo put his head in his hands. Buenas noches, mis amigos. Buenas noches, todos los peleadores bravos que puedan o�avoz. Y buenas noches, Madrid. Hay veinte horas, y la hora para eljazz hot. La selecci�rimera esta noche es una canci�el Norteamericano, Duke Ellington, llamada"In a Sentimental Mood, "con Louis Vola tocando el viol�trum-trum-trum, Marcel Bianchiy Pierre Ferretenguitarras, Django Rheinhardt en la guitarra sola, y, entonces, el grande Stephane Gruppettitocando elviolin. Gusta bien, todo el mundo, gusta bien. The Emerson,in a tan wooden case with white dials and a little light that made the station band glow green, played best on a table beneath the window. Faye angled it slightly to the left, then fiddled with the tuning knob until the signal came in clear. Andres had gone out to yet another meeting, she was exhausted, and she was going to wrap herself up in a quilt, listen to the radio, and read a Djuna Barnes novel that Renatahad discovered somewhere. All day at work, mailing out fund-raising letters for various defense committees, she had planned to spend the evening this way. She really liked the Ellington song, it boded well for the radio program, and for her private evening. Lately too many people, too many rumors, too much jittery bravado. The antidote: spend some time alone, doing things one liked, the more the better, and do them all at once. She would have made herself a cup oftea, but lately, inexplicably, there was no tea to be found. She would go to bed early, she didn't have to man the machine gun until5:30the next morning, and that was hours away. "In a Sentimental Mood." The music that Django Rheinhardt and Stephane Grappellimade was very spare--compared to the lush crooning of the big bands it was thin and plain, hardly anything at all. The rhythm guitars and bass plunked away on the same note; a one-two, one-two beat on the chord that changed rarely, and the tempo of it was peculiar. Should you dance to it in an embrace, you'd have to move quickly, a foxtrot in a hurry. But if you danced apart, like the Charleston, it would be much too slow for the dancers to do any tricks at all. Soloing above the rhythm was first Rheinhardt, a Gypsy guitarist with three fingers burned off in a wagon fire, then Grappelli, a classically trained musician who played nightclub violin--take away the other instruments and he sounded like a violinist at a wedding--all perfumed sentiment. Rheinhardt's playing was jazzy; long, rhythmic runs, the perfect counterpoint to the too-sweet violin. The two men were, Faye thought, opposites bound together, tenderness and cold passion. She wondered if they liked each other. The record had been made at a bistro in Paris called Le Hot Club. Listening to the song, she could see it. Dark and smoky and close, a tiny dance floor, a thin woman in pearls with vacant eyes, barely dancing. Faye looked up from her book, head propped on elbow, and had at that moment a premonition: there would come a day when this song would bring back everything of her time in Madrid. It made her--a bizarre trick--long for a past that was still in the future. She burrowed deeper into the quilt, returned to her book. Sometime during the last flourishes of the violin--Grappelli playing notes that sounded like musical tears, a crazy kind of sadness that wasn't serious at all yet hurt in a special way--the door opened. Andres came in but she did not see him, not really, she saw the man who stood by his side. Immediately she began writing short stories about him, because his presence came to her inmetaphors. _Eyes__l�k slits. He had blue eyes hidden away in there, and black hair and pale skin and square hands. He wore a dark blue shirt buttoned at the throat and a soft gray suit, and when he leaned over, formally, like a Slav, to shake her hand, she could see an automatic pistol bolstered at his waist. Andres was so dear to her, he approached her always like a clumsy man asked to hold--but only for a moment or two while its owner was occupied--a priceless glass vase. She lived in this body every minute of every day, it was just herself. But to him she was treasure. He ran his soft hand along her body and said _silk.__ To be glass and gold and silk was a great honor, she knew, but she also knew it took living up to. The curious thing about Andres was that he was two people. Quite distinctly two people. Andres at a distance was a malleable, hesitant man who moved invisibly in the crowd. But when he spoke, he changed. He was, then, the opposite of malleable and hesitant. Spending time alone with him in a room, you met the strange thing that lived inside him: a fierce and clever animal, a beast that might hunt you down if it decided you'd somehow hurt it. For some reason, Andres had not expected her to be there. He was unpleasantly surprised and his eyes moved around too much. For the sake of appearances he introduced the other man, but gobbled his name so that it was simply a syllable or two. The man took her hand briefly--here and gone. His face seemed closed with tension. The two of them, Andres and his friend, made together a magnetic field of such exclusionary force that she was surprised her very body did not fly right out the window. But they could go to hell. She too fought in this war and what she had learned about war was that slowly but surely it sucked your strength right down to the marrow. She held this ground. And her forces were arrayed about her. The jazz on the radio, the quilt, the book, the bed--the two men would attack at their peril. So they left. Andres mumbling something or other, the Slav honoring her with a httle bow. His eyes were curious, she noticed, finding everything in the room, taking a few notes, and finding her as well.

Toward the end of October the weather turned sunny and soft for one last spell before the fall rains set in and during that time the city of Madrid began to die. The consulate people at Gaylord's Hotel managed to find a cot for Khristo and set it up in a hallway, and there he snatched a few hours' sleep when he could, couriers and code clerks and militaryattach�ushing past him at all hours of the day and night. Lubin, whining incessantly of his family connection, was nonetheless dispatched to a nearby apartment building where a junior officers' dormitory occupied the upper floors. His days were filled with researches through Madrid's birth and marriage records, land-ownership deeds and tax rolls, as he built up dossiers on a long list of Spanish citizens compiled for him by Khristo and Andres. "These individuals represent the gravest threat to world socialism," Khristo told him, "you must get me everything you can. And tell nobody what you are doing." The names had been picked at random from Madrid telephone directories. Lubin, naturally, wanted to tail them from home to office and wherever else they went, but Khristo warned him that these dangerous persons must not be alerted to NKVD interest. At the consulate, Khristo had a day-by-day view of the war, and visitors represented a cross section of the Soviet intelligence and military elite. Walter Ulbricht,head of the German division of the NKVD, passed through, as did no less than three Russian marshals--Konev, Malinovsky, and Rokossovsky--who had come to Spain to learn all they could of German tactics and, most especially, the capabilities of German aircraft and weapons. People at the consulate also kept track of the other side. Admiral Canarisof the Abwehr wasknown to be based near Madrid, sent to Spain by Hitler to study the effects of aerial bombing on a civilian population. This had never before been tried in Europe--Mussolini had used the tactic in Abyssinia but that proved nothing--and the Germans urgently wanted good intelligence on the subject. Thus, beginning in late October, the bombing of Madrid began in earnest. What happened when you bombed a hospital? A school? A column of refugees on a road? With the aid of the Condor Legion pilots, flying Junkers-52 and Heinkel-51bombers, these questions were soon answered. By October20,in an attempt to relieve the pressure being applied by Mola's four columns, Republican forces attacked the town of Illescas, west of Madrid. Singing and chanting slogans, some fifteen thousand fighters rode out from staging areas on double-decker city buses to attack Moroccan and Spanish Legion forces under Barr�he Republican forces fought bravely for three days and gave not one inch until, on October23,they were outflanked by a relief column of cavalry under Telia that came north from Toledo, and they had to retreat back to the city. Seeing the bloody, exhausted fighters returning, the city's population began to feel that the end might be nearer than anyone would admit. This same Nationalist cavalry column was then confronted, in the streets of Esquivias, by Russian tanks under Pavlov. A Republican victory was sorely needed, and this was one way to get it. But the tanks--impossible to maneuver in the narrow streets--could not hurt the cavalry, and the horsemen could not hurt the tanks, so the confrontation was at best a draw. But for those who could read the signs, two particular events signaled the beginning of the end: the national gold went out, and the refugees began to flow in. The gold, some sixty-three million British pounds in value, was taken first by rail to Alicante, then on to Odessa by Russian freighter. Those who were responsible for guarding and counting the gold soon disappeared. Some time later, the Soviet Union announced major gold strikes in the Urals and, for the first time, began to sell gold on the world markets. The refugees from outlying towns fled to the streets of Madrid and there set up housekeeping, amid pigs and goats and dressers and mirrors, building small fires to cook whatever food they could lay their hands on. There was, it seemed, less available every day. The battle at Illescas was plainly audible on the streets of the city and, on October23, Aza�he prime minister of Republican Spain, fled the city in secret--his cabinet was not told he was leaving. He made his way to Barcelona, as close to the safety of the French border as possible, and declared the government of the country officially relocated. The exit of Castello,the minister of war, was even less illustrious. He went mad and had to be carried, foaming at the mouth, from his office. The rest of thegovernment would stick it out for two weeks, then they too would head east. They left the city in a caravan of cars, loaded down with state ministers, bureaucrats, government records, wives and children and pets. A little way outside Madrid, the caravan was halted by a group of hooded men carrying rifles. _Go back,__ they were told, _and lead the people of Madrid__mtheir hour of crisis.The caravan turned around, went west a few miles, turned again, and, achieving maximum speed, went barreling through the roadblock. The city would fight on, under siege, until March of1939,when Madrid fell and the Spanish war ended.

Saschaarrived in Moscow on the ninth of November. Mitya was waiting for him, in a light snow, at Paveletski station. On the train ride north from Odessa he had in essence said good-bye to himself, a teary, miserable business as the train crawled across the southern steppe. In his colonel's uniform, he stood in the doorway of the passenger car as it crawled into the station, floating past a sea of anxious white faces in the waiting crowd. Then the train ground to a halt with a great hiss of steam, and the people behind him began to press--politely; one did not shove a uniform--to get off. He braced himself to attention, then stepped onto the platform. Somewhere in his imagination he had expected to be shot then and there, before his foot touched the earth of Moscow. But the reality was a sudden bear hug from Mitya and affectionate obscenities shouted in a blast of garlicky breath. Mitya drove him home. His apartment, in a quiet little street behind Kutuzov Prospekt, wasuntouched. In the car, he had obliquely referred to Yezhov and the new purge, but Mitya had waved him off. Gossip, gossip, old women's tales. Yes, there had been changes, a few fools had managed to get themselves shot or sent off to the Siberian camps, but they _stole too much,__ conspired for advancement _beyond what was good for them,__ or _screwed the wrong people's wives.__ Not to worry. They had put Saschaup for an Order of Lenin, Second Class, for his service in Spain, and he was certain to get it. Everybody knew Yaschyeritsa was a bastard. He would stay in Spain forever--nobody wanted him back. Not to worry, not to worry. On Monday, he went to work at the NKVD complex on Dzher-zhinsky Square. All were delighted to see him. There were six daisies in a water glass on his desk. His boss, General Grechko--a ham-fisted peasant with a sprouting mole on his nose--pounded him on the shoulders and called him all the old affectionate names: Saschamy poet! My dreamer! My Chekhov! Took him into his clutteredoffice and closed the door, knocked back a few shots accompanied by heartfelt toasts and told him _yes, the medal would go through,__even those pansiesm Section Nine wouldn't dare stop it! Saschamustlearn to squeeze himself small so that Yezhov, all four feet ten inches of him, could give him the requisite hug and kiss when it was presented. So for a week. And he relaxed. And then they took him. According to the rules, it was to be done a certain way; each step in the process had been worked out, laboriously, over time, and thousands and thousands of arrests had fined the system down to a jewellike perfection. Instance: at the moment of arrest, the criminal must be beaten. From the _moment.__ He opened the door to his apartment and they were waiting on the other side, and they hit him in the kidneys so hard he saw a black sun haloed by white lights, came to his senses on the parquet floor of his living room and threw up and for that they kicked him behind the knees. They showed him a fury he had not believed possible, and they knew all the places to hit, wasting not a single punch. It was the ferocity of Russia itself, for that was who he had betrayed, and it had a thousand fists. The intention was that he understand this lesson from the beginning. They threw him into the car like a weightless doll, and there they started on him again. The car was an old GAZM-i and the back seat smelled of what they had, these past several months, been using it for. Pushed face down on the seat, he offered to confess then and there. Confess what? a voice asked. We already know. And they beat him all the way to the Lubianka. According to the rules. They wished him to understand that he had crossed a line, that he was a nonperson; all his _special friends,__ relatives, bosses, no matter who had protected him all through his life and career--they no longer mattered. Hewas no longer _somebody.__ Now he was nobody. Crossing into an endless darkness peopled by other _nobodies__ that nobody could help. They beat him with fury because the German ideal, the slow, nasty, pants-down business so dear to the hearts of the Gestapo on their western border, was repugnant to them. Sadism was despised as an integral aspect of fascism. This was righteous workers' anger, justified. Thus, after some endless, numberless group of nights in a wet cell, when the interrogator beat him up, he did it with a leg torn off a chair. The book of instruction said to do that very thing. So, on the day when they would finally permit him to talk, when it was convenient for them to listen to him, he talked. They guided. It was, clearly, volume they wanted, they were sweeping with the big broom this time. Under Yagoda it had been a flick here, a flick there, specific enemies, definite plots. The _Yezhov-schtna__--Yezhov terror--wasn't like that. A big net, lots of fish, clean 'em out boys and get ready for the next batch. He tried to give them Yaschyeritsa, but they just laughed at that. So he gave them Stoianev, the Bulgarian. Not much, but something. Those Bulgarians had too much Turkish blood for their own good, and it made them plot and scheme like pashas. Who else? They knocked out a tooth over Mitya's name. He was theirs, and they knew better than that. Sent him back to the wet cell and cut off the fishhead soup for two days so that without food he began to hear buzzing flies that didn't exist. When they brought him back he offered them Roubenis, the Armenian presently posing as Andres Cardona. Who had not delivered Fifth Column names because he had secretly gone over to them, with Stoianev's cunning assistance as conduit directly to the Nazis. _Good! Good! More of that.__ But the names of some old schoolmates at Frunze military academy did not much excite them. They had, apparently, already mined that vein. Finally, at the end of his strength, when he knew for a certainty he had begun to die, he gave them General Grechko, his boss, who had maneuvered Stoianev to an assignment in Spain for the very purpose of collaborationwith _Hitlerite elements.__ Suddenly, the interrogation ended. They left him alone in his cell, in an area where the guards wore slippers so that the prisonerscould not hear them coming. They had what they wanted, what they'd wanted all along--Grechko. The others were merely spice in the soup.

In the basement of Gaylord's Hotel in central Madrid, in the code room, Khristo Stoianev closed his eyes with relief. Took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Read the cable again. Yes, it was true. Yaschyeritsa had, one day before the deadline, let him off the hook. He would be part of the operation known as SANCTUARY. He was instructed to work with Roubenis in this _new effort.__ The leader of the operation was expected the following day, Captain Ilya Goldman. Good luck. Good hunting. They used two cars. In the Citroen, Lubin sat behind the wheel with Andres in the passenger seat. Khristo and Ilya Goldman were in back. They'd taken the Degtyaryova machine guns from the trunk and held them across their knees. In the second car, a dark green Opel Kapit�arked across the street and up the block, sat four Spaniards in black suits. They were members of SIM, the Servicio de Investigaci�ilitar, the Republican intelligence service most closely controlled by the NKVD. The building in question was a four-story white house with a marble portico in the elegant diplomatic area near the parliament buildings. The Finnish flag, a blue cross on a white field, hung limply in the early morning drizzle. A tarnished brass plaque beside the front door was inscribedembajadade Finlandia. The last of the Finnish diplomatic staff had cleared out some days earlier, when the Republican government had left the city. "It moved," Lubin said. "I am certain of it." All of them stared up at a curtain hanging at a window on the second floor. "It looks the same to me," Khristo said. "I beg to differ--" "Shut up, Sublieutenant," Ilya said. "It does not matter if they see us. The phone line is dead." Lubin opened his mouth to argue, then thought better of it. Khristo was amazed at the changes in Ilya Goldman. He had become a captain, which meant he had proven himself to somebody powerful, and authority had settled comfortably upon him. He was still the same Ilya, near-sighted, physically slight, with the sharpish features and prominent ears of a rodent--not a rat, but a child's pet mouse. Women were irresistibly drawn to him, Khristo knew, finding him easy to pet, perfect to smother, adorable. Yet, Khristo was certain, among all the Brotherhood Front of1934his was the mind that moved most easily among the twisting trails and alleyways of the intelligence craft. Khristo found himself blunt and obvious by comparison. "I am a Jew," he had long before explained to Khristo, at the Belov exercises, "survival in the shadows is nothing new to us." "There. It moves again." Lubin was right. Damnable ambitious brat. The curtain shifted slightly, then closed quickly. "At last," Ilya said, "we've got them thinking." Andres lit a cigarette. "One could stir the pot, perhaps." "Exactly," Ilya said. "Khristo, you're the one who looks like a bloodthirsty bastard. Go say good morning to our Spanish broth-ers." Khristo left the machine gun on the floor. Walking diagonally across the pavement to the Opel, he kept his eyes from wandering to the second-floor window. But he had the sense of being watched, of being onstage. He just hoped they didn't panic in there and open up on him. Ilya had insisted, of course, that they make doubly sure they had _adequate reason to presume,__ and that they didn't, by error, bag a sackful of Finns. Ilya had learned the Soviet ways in his heart--one required an _incident__ in case the roof fell in. A moving curtain, by itself, wouldn't do. The man in the driver's seat of the Opel rolled down the window as he approached. His face was pitted, and he wore a thick black mustache and sunglasses that hid his eyes. The SIM were brutal types, they were proud of it, using for their executions the Vile Garrote, a slow strangulation device of medieval invention. The victim was seated in front of a post and a metal collar was tightened slowly around the throat until death by ligature occurred--a three-hour death. "Buenas d�,"Khristo said to the man. "They will see you, you know," the man said coldly, eyes invisible behind the dark glasses. "That's the idea. We want to agitate them." A voice from the back seat: "We will be pleased to go in there and _agitate__ them." "In a while," Khristo said. "Let's see some evidence first." "At your pleasure," the driver said, his voice heavy with boredom. They were here for action, would have had the door down and the victims spreadeagled long before first light. Khristo walked back to the Citroen, his face, hidden from the SIM car, soured with disgust. Ten minutes later, the door of the embassy opened cautiously and a man came out. "There he is!" Lubin cried. "A Fifth Columnist, certainly." Walking down the street, the man was a caricature of forced insouciance. Despite himself, his eyes darted to the green Opel. Once he had been fat and sleek, an arrogant bully, showered with cologne and pious as a priest. Now he was unshaven and bleary-eyed, the waistband of his trousers folded beneath his belt to take up the slack. Ilya cranked his window down a half inch, a signal to the other unit. As the man turned the corner, one of the SIM people slid gracefully from the Opel and followed him. The curtain moved again. "Now," Ilya said. In a tight group, the four moved quickly to the door of the embassy. Khristo held the Degtyaryova loosely by his side. Simultaneously, the SIM men scampered around the building toward the rear door. From the back of the building came a pounding on the door and shouting in Spanish. Andres and Khristo moved to one side of the front entrance, Ilya and Lubin to the other. Ilya reached over and knocked politely, calling, "Open, please," in Spanish. For thirty seconds nothing happened. He armed the Degtyaryova and knocked again and repeated the _please,__ and this time the door flew open. An old man with white hair stood with arms akimbo, a crowd of people surged and whined and prayed behind him. "Gently, father, gently," Andres said from Khristo's side. "Please," the man said, "do not hurt us." They forced the crowd back from the door, closed it, andstationed Lubin in front of it, his Tokarev held before him. Lubin's face was flushed with excitement and his eyes were wild, a strand of hair had come loose from his pompadour and lay across his forehead. "Back, back," he said in Russian, "move from the door." "Los Rtisos,"a woman screamed. Lubin brought the pistol to bear on the woman. The old man reached cautiously for his wrist, to push it down. Lubin shot him twice and he folded in half and tilted over sideways onto the floor. Lubin whinnied, a burst of nervous laughter, then clamped his hand over his mouth to stop it. The frightened crowd rushed against the opposite wall, several of the women tore the crucifixes from around their necks and held them up before their faces. Ilya spoke to Khristo in tones of barely controlled anger: "Take that thing away from him, will you?" Khristo caught Lubin's wrist and forced his arm down. Lubin turned and seemed to be looking at him but his eyes were sighdess with excitement. "Sublieutenant Lubin," Khristo said, emphasizing the rank, emphasizing that there _was__ order, even here, "give me your weapon, please." Lubin opened his mouth to speak and the laugh poured out again. With difficulty he controlled it, shutting his eyes. "Now," Khristo said. "I cannot, Lieutenant." They both looked down at the hand, which was frozen shut on the pistol. Khristo took hold of Lubin's chubby fingers and forced them open, one at a time. From the back of the house came the sound of splintering wood as the SIM men ripped the door apart. Lying on the floor, the old man pointed at Lubin. There was red foam on his lips. "You will walk in blackness," he whispered. "Forever and forever. I curse you. I _curse__ you." Lubin giggled and Khristo smacked him on the ear, which turned bright red. The SIM man with the pitted face came downstairs, a baby in the crook of one arm. His other hand towed a woman along by the hair. "This one was upstairs," he explained, "trying to throw her baby out the window." After some confusion, they got everybody sitting on the floor of what had once been the reception area of the embassy. Ilya managed a count. The SIM men had things to say in a Spanish that none of the four NKVD could understand, but the peoplesitting on the floor turned gray and lifeless. They sent Lubin back to the Citro� one of his fingers swollen to double its size, apparently broken by Khristo. Finally, a moving van rolled up to the back door and the SIM took charge of their prisoners. Driving back to Gaylord's Hotel, Ilya informed them that Operation SANCTUARY would continue, though it would be more efficient than it had been that morning. All over Madrid, Nationalist supporters and Falangists were hiding out in embassies, under diplomatic protection. So, now that they'd cleaned out the first group of refugees from an abandoned embassy, they were going to staff it with Soviet intelligence officers playing the part of Finnish diplomats. Taking the enemy into custody would be a lot cleaner and simpler that way. The SIM, he continued, had a similar operation going at the southern edge of the city: a tunnel, which supposedly traveled belowground all the way to Nationalist lines, in fact went only a few hundred yards, then surfaced in the midst of a courtyard where a gang of SIM operatives was waiting. Word was now being spread among the Falangist cells that their members had been betrayed to the enemy, they should flee to the Finnish embassy, where they'd be protected, Or use the tunnel that reached the Nationalist lines. The shift in policy made sense to Khristo. Using Andres against the Falangewas a long-term operation. The new approach was clearly intended to accelerate and intensify the covert effort against the enemy inside the city. Mola's four columns were sharpening the pressure on Madrid; SANCTUARY was clearly an NKVD response. When Yaschyeritsa had lifted the deadline for the effort against the Farmacia Cort�roup, Khristo's relief had been tempered by a nagging anxiety: perhaps they were, for their own reasons, maneuvering him. Now, he felt, he could relax. He hoped silently that they did not ask him to serve as a Finnish diplomat--he didn't think he had the stomach for it. He didn't look like a Finn, he told himself, he was dark, not fair. Buenas noches, mis amigos. Buenas noches, todos los peleadores bravos que puedan o�avoz. Y buenas noches, Madrid. Hay veinte horas, y la hora para eljazz hot... The young woman played with the radio until music flowed into the little room below the eaves. Andres said, "It is the singer Bessie Smith. You will like it." Khristo didn't exactly like it, it made him sad. The voice of a blues singer, stark, with only a piano, bass and drums to fill in the spaces, reached through the crackle of the nighttime static and touched his heart. He could not understand the words, but the sorrow of it was all too clear. _Enough grief for one day,__ he thought. The nasty scene at the Finnish embassy refused to leave his mind, and he and Andres had decided to drown their war in a bottle of Spanish gin. They'd split the cost of the bottle and taken it back to Andres's garret at9Calle de Victoria. For him to be there, with Andres and his American girlfriend and the German woman called Renata,was very much against the rules. But he was tired of the rules. He was tired of a lot of things. He stared at the bottle, which had a Spanish matador on the label, his expression rigid with pride of manhood, indifference in the face of death. For Khristo, the more he drank the gin, the less he liked the matador. Andres's girlfriend was called Faye--it was her idea to play a card game called cribbage. The four of them sat around a small table with a pegboard at the center and tried to make their cards add up to thirty-one. Such achievements were rewarded by the advance of a small stick in the pegboard. He had no idea if he was winning or losing--he did know that the smarmy matador on the gin bottle had nearly destroyed what little mathematical ability he possessed. Renata, his partner, looked at him in despair from time to time. The four of them spoke English as they played--it turned out to be the only language they had in common other than Spanish, which they had to work at all day long. The American girl had already stifled a giggle at his peculiar diction and he'd looked up sharply, only to be signaled by Andres that no discourtesy had been intended. She certainly was different. Had caught him staring at her at one point and had stared right back. God save her, he thought, from ever visiting Bulgaria, where such looks had meanings he was sure she didn't intend. Did she? No. "I went to University City today," she said casually. For a moment, the game stopped dead. There was heavy fightingin the university area, where one of Mola's Moorish columns had breached the city's defenses. The Army of Africa, Franco's original striking force, had already captured the bus and tram terminals in the suburbs. "What?" Andres looked at her with horror. "You heard me." "Perhaps you want to be killed. La Pasionariawill announce it on the streets--a courageous death, our American sister, _no__pasar�" "Well, they asked me to go at work. So I went." "Why? Who asked you?" "A woman at work was pregnant, the baby started coming early and the labor was very bad. So they sent me to bring back the husband, who was holding the College of Agriculture." "What a war,"Renatasaid. "I met a group of British machine-gunners--I'm playing the jack of clubs--and they told me the Moors have been holding the College of Medicine for several days." "Really?"Renatasaid. "That I had not heard." "It's true." Renataput a five down on the jack, and moved their peg. "This fellow, an Oxford man, by the way, told me the Poles in the Dabrowsky Brigade won it back for an afternoon. A shambles, they said. The Moors built fires in the hallways and roasted the laboratory animals on their bayonets and ate them. Now they'll all get rare diseases. The Poles chased them out by putting hand grenades on the elevators and sending them up to the floor they were holding." Khristo shook his head in disbelief. "What a war." He echoed Renata, knowing the phrase must be correct. Faye smiled grimly. "Fifth floor," she said. "Travel accessories, kitchenware, hand grenades." "What is?" Khristo asked. "Oh, you know. Department store elevators." "Ah," he said, feigning knowledge. It was his turn to play. He tried to concentrate, but the cards in his hand made no particular sense, a random collection of numbers and pictures. From across the table, Renatasaid, "Forward, comrade. And we shall gain a final victory." He looked up from his cards, but her smile was gende and encouraging. The telephone rang, the jingling of a tiny bell in two short bursts. All four reacted to the sound. It rang again. Andres moved toward the corner, where it was mounted on die wall. He picked up the receiver and said, "Si?" Listened for several seconds, then said, _"Momentito,__porfavor."Left the handset dangling from its cord and walked over to Khristo and said quietly, in Russian, "Someone wishes to speak with you." Khristo carefully laid his cards face down on the table. A tiny muscle below his eye began to run like a motor. Nobody, _nobody,__ knew he was there. He searched Andres's face for a sign but the man's expression had gone cold. In that moment, they silently accused each other of betrayal. Then Khristo pushed himself away from the table and walked the few steps to the telephone. He'd become acutely conscious of his surroundings: the silent people in the room, the music on the radio, the rhythmic echo of distant artillery. He held the receiver carefully in his hand, listened to the hum of die open line, and at last said _"Si?"__ "No names, please," said a voice in Russian. He knew the accent, die edgy nasal tone. It was Ilya Goldman. "Very well," he answered in Russian. "I have just cast your horoscope. It says tonight is a goodurneto travel. It says start as soon as possible. I take this to mean right away." "Very well. Thank you for telling me." "Your friend is born in the same moon." "I understand." "The time may come when we should meet again. Is it possible?" "Yes. Yes, it's possible. In the north, I think." "A good choice. How can we manage it?" "Our old sign. The one we used with the dog. Initials and numbers. You recall?" "Ah, yes, very well. Where might such signals appear?" "Matrimonial ads. In the newspaper." "Sorry to see you go, my friend." "Join us." "Soon, maybe. Not now." "Good-bye, then." "Good luck." The connection broke. He hung up the phone carefully and turned to face the others. Faye saw his face and said, "My God, what is it?" "They come to arrest us," he said in English. "Me and Andres. But they will take you also." He turned to Renata."And you." "The Falange?" Fayesaid, incredulous. "No," Andres said. "Not the Falange."

They kicked down the door some twenty minutes later--about the time it took to drive from Gaylord's to the Calle de Victoria. Maltsaev and three assistants, with several more waiting in cars below. The radio was playing jazz and there were cards lying about on a small table and a half bottle of Spanish gin and ashtrays full of cigarettes. One of the men silently unplugged the radio and carried it down to the car. Another one found some women's clothing from America, and he too left. When his comrade in the automobile saw that he went up himself, but there wasn't much left--a combination lock and he didn't know the combination, but he took it anyhow, perhaps it could be traded. Maltsaev went to the telephone but the cord had been sliced in two. Se� Tovar, the janitor's wife, was brought up the marble stairs with her arm bent nearly double behind her back. She cursed them all the way. These tenants were Fifth Columnists, she was told. But she knew better. Told Maltsaev to let her go or the women of Madrid would hound him to his grave. He nodded briefly and his men released her. They went up to the roof and found F�xand beat him up a little, but he didn't seem to know much of anything. At last, when they'd removed everything they wanted, they tore the apartment to pieces, but found nothing. Maltsaev and one of his men were the last to leave. "Too bad," he said. The man nodded in agreement. "One has to learn, of course, who warned them. General Bloch will want someone." "Perhaps his sublieutenant, Lubin," the man suggested. "A logical choice," Maltsaev said. "Flies for Yaschyeritsa." "What?" the man asked. Maltsaev dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Such idiotsone had to work with in this profession. At �east the other one, Kulic, the one in the mountains, would be well fixed. He'd made sure of that. The night's work wasn't entirely wasted. Now for Lubin. The family was powerful, but that could be overcome with a confession. He'd get that in a hurry, he was sure.

They could go west to Portugal. The Russians would not expect that because it meant crossing battle lines, then working their way, by bluff or stealth, through hundreds of miles of Nationalist-held countryside. They could go south, through Republican territory, and buy passage on a boat across the Mediterranean to Tan-giers, a French possession. They could go northeast, to Port-Bou, the Pyrenees crossing point to southwestern France. But this mountain pass was Republican Spain's only major overland border access and would be subject to exceptionally heavy surveillance. Crossing the Pyrenees on the smugglers' routes was not appealing--too many travelers were never heard of again when they attempted that route. The Russians would use the telephone--the system was operated on contract by American personnel from American Telephone and Telegraph and worked well, for both sides, throughout the war--to alert NKVD units throughout the country, but both Khristo and Andres doubted they would have sufficient time to activate Republican forces. They also doubted the Russians would tell their allies that intelligence officers had gone missing. They decided to travel north. Khristo had overheard, at Gay-lord's, that the Spaniards were arming fishing boats in Bilbao and using them to bring food into Spain from French coastal ports. Bilbao was two hundred miles away, it would take all night, but the fastest way out of Spain was the best. Dawn found them still trying to get out of Madrid. It was a night of madness in the streets. Buildings unaccountably on fire, fire trucks skidding on streets wet with a slow, persistent rain that had started at dusk. They tried the Gran Via but found it blocked by Russian tanks brought up into battery position, their steel sides shiny in the rain, engines muttering and backfiring. Some streets were blocked by refugee campsites--tarpaulinsorrain capes rigged upright with broomsticks to keep out the rain. Khristo saw a couple making love under a blanket on a brass bed in a house made of wooden crates. On one of these streets they hit a cat. Khristo slowed instinctively, then realized they could not afford to stop and stepped on the accelerator. When it was almost dawn, they were forced to halt at an intersection as private cars being used as ambulances sped past, coming from the direction of University City. The drivers rang cowbells, mounted on the roof, by pulling on a rope. While they were stopped, an old man approached the car. He wore a formal business suit, with vest decorously buttoned, and carried a tightly furled umbrella on his forearm. His beard was clipped to a precise triangle and a pair of pince-nez sat squarely on the bridge of his nose. He looked, Khristo thought, like a professor of Greek and Latin. He peered in the window and greeted them as brothers and sisters in freedom. "I have been to war tonight, " he said, "and I have been wounded." He half turned and Khristo could see blood seeping from a small wound at the back of his neck. "So, " the man said cheerfully, "it's the hospital for me!" He saluted them with his free hand and disappeared around a corner. A little later they saw, they thought, one of the infamous Phantom Cars, packed with militiamen who arrested and executed suspected Fifth Columnists at night. A rifle barrel protruded from a rear window. Then, when they were almost out of the city, a Checaunit on bicycles stopped them. Khristo chatted with their leader, holding the Tokarev below the sightline of the driver's window. He was free. It had come slowly, but when comprehension overtook him his spirit soared with excitement. It was as though a hand had let go of the back of his neck and for the first time in years he could raise his head and see the horizon. So they would not take him back. The Checaman at the window was very slow--he had all the time in the world. But Khristo drew an invisible line for him and waited for him to cross it and die. Yaschyeritsa would get no more satisfaction from him than dancing on his grave. The man talked on and on. It was interesting about his job that he got to meet so many different kinds of people who walked about in this world, who would have ever imagined that on this rainy night in Novemberhe would engage in conversation with a citizen of Soviet Russia, now that was why he found this job so very interesting. Finally Andres leaned across from the passenger seat and whispered that they had only an hour to spend with these girls here before they had to return to the fighting. The man's face slid gradually into an immense leer. He winked, stood back from the car, and waved them through. Lascivious shouts of"Viva la Rusia!"followed them down the street. For a time they traveled on the main road to Burgos. But they began to see men in suits standing by cars parked beside the road, so they moved onto the narrow lanes that went through the villages. In some nameless place in the vast wheat heartland north of Madrid the car stopped. They opened the hood and looked inside, but none of them knew anything about cars. The engine gave off a blast of heat that shimmered the air above it. It ticked in the silence and smelled of burnt oil. A small man appeared from nowhere, riding a bicycle with an infant in the basket. They spoke to him in Spanish but he did not understand Spanish, or perhaps he was deaf. He pointed to his ears again and again. He smiled at them. Showed them his baby. Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached into the engine and did something to something and signaled Khristo to start the car. It started. The man refused to take money, waved to them as they moved off. In the car they made plans for what they would do in Paris. What they would eat. Where they would go. Madrid, it began to be clear once they were away from it, had been a prison. Soon they would be in Burgos, it wasn't so far from there to Bilbao. They would get on a fishing boat and sail away to freedom. The car stopped again, on a tiny road bounded by uncut wheat rotting in the fields. There was nothing for miles. Khristo's hand shook as he raised the hood. He wanted to throttle the engine hoses until the Citroen bowed to his will. This had never happened to him before, the car had always run perfectly. They decided to walk, to march cross-country taking only pistols and whatever else would fit in their pockets. They started out, Andres sang a song to get them moving along. Suddenly, a German spotter plane appeared and swooped low to have a look at them. Faye waved to it and smiled. It disappeared over the horizon and they ran back to the car--some cover was preferable to being caught in the open. The plane returned and buzzed the car, then left. Khristo, for no particular reason, turned the ignition key one last time for luck. The Citroen roared to life and he very nearly wept with relief. At dusk, they worked their way around the outskirts of Burgos. Found a shack with an ancient, hand-operated gas pump, and bought fuel from a suspicious peasant woman in black who overcharged them mercilessly. They had to pool their remaining pesos to pay her--Khristo had been kept on a small living allowance,most of his NKVD pay _banked safely for him awaiting his return to__Moscow.The woman watched all this with an eye like a hunting hawk. She went into the shack to retrieve some coins for change, and Khristo and Andres whispered briefly about doing away with her. They saw her watching them through a window. Andres looked about and discovered there were no telephone lines going into the shack, then realized suddenly that all she wanted to do was steal their change. They drove away without it. The road began to climb through forests and the Citroen stuttered and threatened to stall. Khristo pushed the gas pedal to the floor; the car faltered, then roared ahead. Bad gasoline, they thought, watered. Late at night they came to the R�Nervi�hich ran eight miles to the Atlantic. They easily found the fishing boats, which had 101mm fieldpieces mounted fore and aft. Andres got out of the car and wandered down the street of dockside bars, sailors' haunts with anchors and sextants and curling waves painted on their signs. Khristo, Faye and Renatastayed in the car, too tired to talk, the burst of energy that had seen them through the long night had waned suddenly, replaced by depression and exhaustion. Khristo time and again caught himself fading out. "Where do you suppose he is?" Faye asked at one point. Khristo shrugged. Told himself to keep watch, knowing how vulnerable they were. The American girl fell asleep, her head sliding along the upholstery until he felt its weight settle on his upper arm. In her sleep she turned slightly toward him, until the place where her mouth rested grew warm with her breath. He remained very still and fancied he could hear, in the rise and fall of her breathing, the progress of her dreams. They were all asleep when a hand banged hard on the window. Khristo came to his senses in terror, then saw it was Andres, with a sea captain. He didn't look like a sea captain, he was wearing a suit and tie. He had gotten married that morning, Andres explained. Khristo got out of the car and went with them to a bar down a little alley between warehouses--moving the Tokarev to the side pocket of his jacket and keeping his hand on it. The bar was only twelve feet long, with five stools. They drank a glass of wine and made their offer: the Citroen and two Degtyaryova machine guns in exchange for passage to France. Yes, good, the man said. He could take two of them for that. Which two would it be? He asked too much, they protested. He thought not. The Russians had come around, he explained, looking for them. The license plate and automobile were just as they had described. He had, this very day, become a married man. He now had responsibilities. And it was his wedding night. If he was to spend it on the high-running sea of the Gulf of Vizcayainstead of the high-running sea of the marriage bed, he must be well paid. The three of them returned to the car, Andres suggesting that the women carried extra pesos. Khristo saw his game without prompting. They would put a gun in this one's ear and solve the problem that way. Back at the car, they told Renataand Faye about the captain's demand. Andres suggested that the two women should go by fishing boat, he and Khristo would find a guide and use the smugglers' trails across the Pyrenees. Faye took a little watch off her wrist and held it up to the captain. He took it in his hand. Listened to it tick. It was Russian, she explained, brought to America by her grandmother. All that time, she said, it worked perfectly. The captain agreed to take them and put the watch in his pocket. They reached France the following day, wading ashore at the fishing village of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Shoes in hand, they walked up a narrow beach of brown pebbles to a low seawall. There was a policeman sitting on the wall, he had taken his hat off and set it on a page of newspaper to keep it from the tar, and was eating an apple with a small knife, and he arrested them. Marquin and his three compatriots very nearly did reach Portugal. Their method was simple enough. They walked only at night. They walked near the road--so as not to lose their way--but never on it. They stole only vegetables, never chickens, to keep local anger to a minimum. A few missing vegetables, they knew, were not worth an encounter with the authorities. A mile short of the Portuguese border, their luck ran out. The army was running things in that region, and they were discovered sleeping under a bridge. The first interrogation was superficial, but in time they were taken by truck to a unit of Nationalist intelligence and there placed under the care of a Moroccan corporal named Bahadi, who specialized in getting answers to any and all questions. Marquin lasted the longest, about an hour. When the officer in charge was satisfied that he had everything he could get, they were taken out and shot in a courtyard. Never, following the session with Bahadi, were four men happier to die. Thus the story of Kulic's mercy made its way to Nationalist intelligence headquarters in Toledo, and was there submitted for analysis to Oberstleutnant Otto Eberlein,one of the unit's Abwehradvisers.Eberlein,recruited by the NKVD in1934under motivation of political idealism, passed the information to his contact in Toledo, a nurse in a podiatrist's office--by1938he had surely the most pampered feet in Spain--and from there it soon enough reached Colonel General Yadomir Bloch, who called Maltsaev and told him to take care of the matter. Maltsaev simply moved the appropriate information back through the system to Nationalist intelligence: a time, a date, the name of the town--Estillas--then had Madrid Base radio Kulic and assign the mission. From the beginning, the attack on the police station at Estillaswent badly. He had two men sick with high fever and dysentery and they had to be left at the deserted village. Which meant he was down to fourteen souls. And the ammunition situation was beginning to pinch. Madrid Base had been informed by radio of the executions and sickness, and the need for resupply, but had confirmed the original order. Someone, somewhere, apparently thought that the Estillaspolice station was a critical target, and his was not to reason why. Still, a daylight attack. And with reduced forces. And with morale, after "justice" had been dealt to the four POUM traitors, at its lowest ebb. He was close, at one point, to canceling the mission and accepting in return whatever Madrid decided to do to him. Only one factor kept him from that. An initial reconnaissance persuaded him that Estillaswas a rather easy place to attack. Just behind the police station lay the town cemetery, a place frequented only on Sundays, when the townspeople came out to place bunches of flowers on the gravesites. Scheduled to strike on a Wednesday afternoon, the raiding party could move up close before making themselves known. They got as far as the cemetery, then all hell broke loose. Somebody knew they were coming. Because once the unit was in place, well spread out and awaiting his signal, the mortars and machine guns started in. And the mortars had been zeroed in. Accurately. _Betrayed,__ he thought. The first shells raised enormous dirt plumes in the cemetery, smashing headstones to splinters and blowing the dead out of their graves--a fountain of whitened bones rising in the air, then raining down on the heads of the guerrillas. The sergeant, a brave man, stood up and waved the men forward. Marhine-gun fire stitched him across the belly and he died howling. Kulic fired twice, at nothing in particular, then a blast concussion picked him up and slammed him senseless against the earth. His mind swayed back and forth, a sickening, dizzy rise and fall from one part of consciousness to another, and he found himself crawling. He meant not to be taken alive, felt around for his rifle but it had disappeared. He heard some of his men weeping, managed to get to one knee before the next shell came in, felt the shrapnel take him all along the left side, knew his left eye was blinded, knew nothing more after that. In Catalonia, some way inland from the ancient spice city of Tarragona, in the valley of the Rio Ebro, lay the village of San Ximene. In the late summer of1938,a company of Nationalist infantry moved into the town and took it without a shot being fired. By then, the conquest of the province was no longer an issue, and nobody wanted to be the last to die. As the troops marched in, a little winded because the village stood high above the road, a few people lined the narrow lane, waved tiny Monarchist flags, and gave the cheer heard now all across the country."Han pasado,"they called out."Han pasado!"They _have__ passed. Don Teodosioand Do�lora and Miguelito the chauffeur were ceremoniously released from captivity. Both mayors,Avenafrom the PSUC and Quintoof the POUM, were ceremoniously shot. There wasn't much else to do, so the captain ordered his men forward. They had liberated San Ximene, and he felt they ought to go on, to Calaguer or Santoval, before nightfall. Marching out of the village in good order, they passed through an orchard of fig trees. A sergeant was sent to reconnoiter, but there was no fruit to be had. The sergeant was a country man, and told the captain that the trees had not been pruned. Branches had broken off under the weight of the fruit, disease had spread into the trunks from the open wood, and that was the end of the San Ximene figs.

The World at Night

"Steady on!" "Dear boy. Trod on your paw, have I?" "Damn near." "I am sorry. Can't see a thing with the lights off. Candles are lovely in a ballroom, but they do keep one in shadow." "Bloody Frenchies. If it ain't a knife 'n' fork they can't work it." "Not the power, actually. One of Winnie's _effects__ I think. Makes it funereal." "Mmm." "I'm Roger Fitzware." "Jimmy Grey. West Sussex Fitzwares, is it?" "C'est moi. " "Mmm. Been in Paris long?" "Live here, actually, most of the time." "Do you. I'm just in from Cairo. Over at the Bristol." "How do you find it?" "S�icegone to hell, of course, and full of Americans." "In Cairo on business?" "Little of everything, really." "Hot as ever?" "Yes. Damned filthy too." "Dear old thing." "Not my sort of place, all those little brown men running about and stabbing each other." "Oh well. One puts up with the little brown men. For the sake of the little brown boys." "Mmm. Wouldn't know about that." "Ah, here's the lovely Ginger." "Roddy Fitzwarel You promised to call--Who's this?" "Ginger Pudakis, meet Jimmy Grey." "Delighted. Mmm. Yes, well, think I see somebody I know. Good to have met you, Fitzware." "See you." "Roddy! You are exceptionally bad. You terrified that poor man." "Oh well, it _is__ Paris, after all." "Not here, my lamb. Here is a little corner of a foreign field, and that fellow, if I'm not mistaken, is something or other to Viscount Grey." "The1914man? 'The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time.' That the one?" "Yes." "The lamps are certainly out here." "Where's M�" "Home. In a great snit." "Oh Roddy, you mustn't be cruel." "Me! Ginger dear, I've been an absolute bishop, really I have. But he snuck out while I was having me nap, taxied off to Gabou-chard and bought himself the most impossible tie. Couldn't let him wear it, could I, not to Winnie and Dicky's. Had a sunset. Some dreadful peachy pinky sort of thing they sold him. Poor M�d his filthy Bochetaste, he can't help himself at all. When I left he was playing Mendelssohn on the Victrola and mumbling about Selbstmordor some such thing. Ending it all." "Too sad. All for a tie." "Told him not to get blood on the drapes." "You're a horrid man, you really are." "C'est moi. Care to step onto the balcony?" "And what would you do on the balcony?" "Think of something, dear girl." "You probably would." "Speaking of that, where's old Winnie and Dicky?" "Grand entrance at midnight, one is told. From the ballroom elevator." "Too bad M�sn't here to see this, he quite loves the Teutonic style. Draped candles, urns with cypress, roses painted black. Nobody actually dead, is there?" "Heavens no. On the stroke of midnight, Winnie Bealeturns thirty-nine. It's a funeral for her youth." "Ah." "Really, one must love the Americans." "You married one, my dear, so you must. Whatever became of Mr. Pudakis?" "In Chicago, as always. Where he does something with meat. Bloody old Europe didn't agree with poor Harry." "Hello! Something's up, the music's gone queer." "It's the funeral march. Is it? Yes, I think it is. Sounds a bit odd from a jazz band." "Speaking of odd, regardezthe elevator." "Good God. Now that is courage." "Ain't it though? Throw yourself a birthday bash and make an entrance entirely bare-arsed. _Bravo Wmnie! Hurrah!"__ "Well, not entirely bare-arsed. The hat is from Schiaparelli, my sweet, the pearls are Bulgari, and the little catch-me/fuck-me shoes are made by a little man in the Rue des Moulins." "Still, rather a decent set of flanks..." "Now Roddy, don't be boring." "Tell me, dear girl, who's that hard-looking gent presiding over the salmon?" "Him? You know him. It's Mario Thoeni, the tenor, though one wouldn't exactly say hard-looking..." "Gawd not him. The _waiter."__ "Oh who knows. Some dreadful Slav from Heininger. Winnie finds him decorative." "She's right, you know. He's quite thoroughly decorative." "Roddy Fitzware, you're not to poach!" "Dear girl, wouldn't think of it." All his life he had handled tools, but this one had its own special set of perfections. It was made of silver, with a pleasing weight that sealed it to the hand, a broad filigree surface ending in a rounded point and a subtle edge of just the proper sharpness. He pressed it down through the pink flesh of the salmon--choosing a natural striation for the cut--deftly balanced the portion atop the server, then slid it neatly onto the maize-colored plate. With ceremony, he laid the server on a silver dish and took up a small ladle. He swirled it twice through the thick _sauce diplomat__--as though to banish some godlike impurity--then, from the left, drizzled a thin river to the salmon slice, paused to anoint the top with a decorative pool, as in a garden, then ran the river to a perfect delta on the other side of the plate, stopping just short of the thick gold banding. With a tiny silver trident, he fashioned a triangle of capers on the dryland north of the river, then, thed�uement, placed two black truffle "rocks" at the edge of the garden pool. White-gloved hand turned beneath the plate so that the intrusive thumb barely rode the edge, he proffered the master-work, eyes down, speaking the words"Merci, madame"in a soft undertone. That afternoon, carrying silver trays ofhors d'oeuvrescovered with brown paper upstairs to the kitchen that served the ballroom, he had observed the Beales' chef preparing the _sauce diplomat.__ Fish stock, cream--too thick to pour, it had to be spooned from the bottle--lobster butter, brandy and cayenne. Now, in a crystal bowl by his right hand, the sauce's combined scents drifted up and tormented him. Normally, when he worked at the Brasserie Heininger, he could manage a discreet sample somewhere between kitchen and dining room, but here one was in the public eye. For a moment, there was no one to serve--a group of rosy-cheeked men favored the roast--and he gazed out into the crowd with the particular dead-eyed, unseeing servant's stare he'd been taught, suggesting that only the ritual of the salmon could bring him to life. Yet he did see. A clever play. Written out moment to moment by the guests themselves as they moved about the polished black linoleum in candlelight. Each one, he thought, achieved a sort of glossy sainthood in a special and individual way. Yes, there were trembling hands and bulging eyes and mighty bosoms and shiny pates. No different than Vidin, really. Yet here, by way of some magical process these people had thought up, the common pranks life played upon the body mattered less. The old ladies had big rings and naughty eyes. The fat men were highly polished and toldjokes. The chinless girls laughed and shook their little breasts. The wispy young men with wispy mustaches leaned over cleverly and seemed watchful and intelligent. Thank God, he thought, for Omaraeff. Who had brought him to such spectacles. He served a plumpish, fair-haired man who seemed lost and friendless and on his way to being very drunk in a very depressing way. Then a tall dowager with heavily rouged cheeks who glared down at him with apparent anger. That he would dare to serve her? Perhaps. These were, for the most part, English people, a tribe that swathed its rituals in mystery and seemed perpetually annoyed at the world, offended, perhaps, at humanity's never-ending attempts to discover what they wanted. He did not care. He had only salmon to offer, and _sauce diplomat.__ The American woman, Winnie Beale, floated through the room, principally nude and entirely without shame. Clothed only in social position. Which, curiously, sufficed. He had served her table at Heininger several nights in a row--during the opera season, late suppers at Heininger were virtually compulsory--and Omaraeff had informed him that he was now to work at private parties in the Bealemansion on the Rue de Varenne. Informed him on other subjects as well. Told him, for instance, that Winifred Bealehad in fact begun life as Ethel Glebb, daughter of a trolley motorman in a smoky Ohio town on a lake. Worked as a telephone operator. Contrived to meet, and ultimately marry, Dicky Bealeof Syracuse, the heir to an immense fortune acquired by his grandfather through the manufacture of stovepipe. Omaraeff knew everything. Had thus prepared him for the inevitable grappling match, precisely foreseen and described. The summons to the house. The taxi ride across a rainy Paris afternoon with a tray oflangoustineson his lap. The maid's direction to "bring them upstairs." The small library that overlooked the Rodin gardens. The flowered cotton shift so accidentally open. The sly look, the giggle, the teasing wordplay of a young girl. The balletic sweep into his arms. The rolling around on the Oriental carpet. "Meet the attack, " Omaraeff had said, "respond to each sortie, but do not advance. Should she wish the cannon rolled out and fired, let her see toit, but do not permit yourself to be provoked. A single sign of passion on your part, dear Khristo, and you will work here no more." Those instructions he had followed to the letter. She was, up close, frightfully plain. Her face apparently beaten into neutrality over the years, so oiled, patted, painted, baked, kneaded and creamed that it ultimately had neither expression nor feature. It had become a blank canvas, to be turned into whatever she wished. The act was not consummated. She let him up. Kissed him like a fond aunt. He became again the waiter, smoothed his hair, busied himself for a moment with the arrangement of _langotistines__ on the tray, then returned to the restaurant by M�o, pocketing the cab fare. Some of the guests were dancing. A clickety-clack step to the fast foxtrot produced by the band, four American Negroes who performed most nights at Le Hot Club. The leader, chopping rhythmically at the white piano with thick fingers, was called Toledo Red, his trademark, an unlit stub of cigar, clamped in his teeth as he played. The dancers leaned their upper bodies together, eyes vague, flopping about like unstrung puppets. Khristo watched for a time, seeming to look through them, in fact studying their dance in the smoked-glass mirrors that lined the walls. He noticed that the drapes--black for this occasion, normally violet--had fallen open at one of the tall windows, and he thought he could see snowflakes drifting slowly past the glass. It was the last week in March. "Hallo there, Nick." He snapped to attention. _"Madame,"__ he said, bowing slightly. "A bit of salmon?" "Bien s�adame." He took up the silver salmon knife. She was so pale and pretty, this one, like a movie star, a fragile flower in the last decline, dying in the final reel. She was often at his table at Heininger and, as the champagne bottles emptied--"More shampers, Nick!" they would call out--her cheeks blushed red and she became excited and clapped her hands and shrieked with delight at anything anybody said. "Merci, madame." "Thanks ever so much." Nick. At the internment camp near Perpignan, where the French had detained him while the socialist government chased its tail in circles over what was to be done about the Spanish war, Khristo had decided to become a Russian. He was alone at the camp; his three fellow fugitives had fled into the night, having decided that safety lay in ignorance of each other's intentions. Renataand Faye Bernshad been released almost immediately. Andres had been held for a day, then produced a Greek passport from the lining of his jacket and was freed. But Khristo was officially without documents--the Russian passport with thenom deguerre Markov was nothing but a danger to him and now lay beneath four inches of earth in a Spanish field--so was designated by French officials a Stateless Person. A Russian, he believed, could more easily lose himself in a city like Paris. A Bulgarian would stand out; the Parisian�gr�mmunity from that country was not large. But the plan did not work. The League of Nations official who finally processed him, in the last week of1936,was a Czech, and Khristo dared not try to fool him. Thus he left the camp under his brother's name, Nikko, and the last name Petrov, common in Bulgaria. The English patrons of the restaurant had shortened Nikko to Nick. The camp had been a vile place. The internees spent their days shuffling around the barbed-wire perimeter or playing cards--the deck made of torn strips of paper--for cigarettes. They huddled around stoves made of punched-out petrol tins and plotted endlessly in a stew of languages. After more than a month of it, Khristo had thought seriously of escaping. The Senegalese troops who guarded them sometimes did not bring water all day long and the inmates were tortured by thirst, pleading through the wire while the guards stared at them curiously. Sometimes a gate was left open--a clear invitation to escape. If one were caught, however, deportation back to Spain was automatic. Yet he'd had, in the camp, one great stroke of luck. He'd met a Russian called Vladi Z., a soldier of fortune from an�gr�mily in Berlin, former harnessmakers to the czar's St. Petersburghousehold. Vladi Z. had worked for the Comintern, smuggling guns into Spain through the mountains. He'd taken to putting a bit of money aside for himself, but greed overtook his sense of propriety and he'd been caught at it. Snapped up by the Checain Barcelona, he had managed to escape, bribing his guards with gold secreted "where the sun never shines." After some days spent wandering helplessly in the Pyrenees, he had crossed into France at Port-Bou with a group of American journalists. There he claimed German citizenship, but he had shed his passport in fear of the Checaand thus was interned. No matter, he confided to Khristo, his family in Berlin would soon have him out. "You must go to Paris," he said, "even the devil won't find you there." He had assumed, without being told, that Khristo was on the run. "In Paris," he continued, "one sees Omaraeff. A Bulgarian like yourself. A great man. Headwaiter at the famous Brasserie Heininger. Tell him Vladi Z. sent you and give him my greatest respects. And if, perchance, you are some provocateur chekist piece of filth, then we, _we,__ you understand, will have you in the ground by sundown." On the train north, Khristo's heart had pounded with excitement. Watching the winter countryside roll past, he touched the Nansenpassport in his pocket a hundred times and hoped and dreamed more than he'd ever dared. Paris. _Paris.__ The song ended; the dancers broke apart and applauded themselves. Toledo Red shifted the cigar stub to the other corner of his mouth and banged out the introduction to "The Sheik of Araby." There were squeals of anticipation from the dance floor as the saxophone player, a great fat fellow with a gold-toothed grin, draped one of the Beales' monogrammed damask napkins over his head in a make-believe burnoose. Winnie Bealehad reappeared, after her dramatic entrance, dressed in emeraldcr� dechineand now began dancing her own version of the desert slave girl--Valentino's beloved in a Balenciaga gown. She gave Khristo an affectionate leer as she swept past him. Strange, he thought, these people of the night who glittered in the world of Heininger and the Bealemansion. Mood-swept, arrogant, insecure, yet at times unbelievably kind. They were the gods and goddesses of this city, from the smoke-filled jazz dens onthe Rive Gauche to the chauffeured caravans that moved through the Bois de Boulogne at dawn. Yet they took a curious, backhanded pride in knowing a simple waiter. He had become, of all things, a minor feature of this world. Nick. Stranger still, he cared for them. He was younger than most, yet they played at being his children. "Nick, my button has torn loose!" "Be a good fellow, Nick, and help Madame with her lobster." And even, "Oh Nick, I feel so blue." They had, it seemed to him, bad dreams--bad dreams they did not understand. Premonitions. And they sensed, somehow, that he did understand. That he knew what was coming. And that, when it came, he would remember their affection for him, that he would protect them. They would never admit that _they__ were the Jews of Berlin, the aristocracy of Russia, the wealthy Spaniards trapped in Madrid and forced to flee to the Finnish embassy, yet, deep down, they sensed that the world as they'd known it had only a little more time to run. "Dear boy?" Again caught in reverie, he was startled, and looked directly at the man standing before him. He was on the short side and quite handsome, with thick, reddish-brown hair swept across a noble forehead. His eyes at first seemed exhausted--dark and shadowed--then Khristo realized that makeup had been used to create the illusion. Looking down quickly, Khristo reached for the salmon server. "Not necessary, dear boy, I've had me supper." He handed over a business card. "Give us a call, will you sometime? I'm a photographer, in a sort of way. Like to take your portrait." Then he was gone. A fine, dry snow was falling on Paris as he walked home from the party. It dusted the cobblestones pale and sugary and hardened the yellow beams of the streetlamps into severe triangles--like a painted backdrop, he thought, for a street scene in a nightclub act. He watched a boulevard turn silver before his eyes, and some trick of the light made the spires of the churches seem disconnected, floating free in the windless night air. All for his hungry eyes, he thought, all this. He had only to open his heart a little and the rity breathed itself into him, sent him climbing in a perfect,pointless, nighttime elation to a height that no sorrow could reach. A pair of policemen, rubber capes black and shining, rode past on their bicycles. A window of the H� St. Cyr squeaked open and a young man in gartered shirtsleeves stared up at the sky. Framed in the oval window of a taxi, idling at a corner of the Rue de Rennes,a man and a woman kissed lightly--lips barely in contact--then moved apart and touched each other's faces with the tips of their fingers. At the all-nightcaf�nthe Ruedes �oleshe saw a group of well-rouged old ladies, bundled into the collars of their Persian lamb coats, gathered at a table near the bar. Each one had a tiny dog on her lap or in the crook of her arm. From the way the women leaned across the table, they seemed like conspirators in a plot. It was, after all, well past three in the morning. What brought them together like this? _The Affair of the Little Dogs,__ he thought. The oddest conspiracy of1937,a year of conspiracies. But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. _Amours.__ Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal, they were the true life and business of a place where money was never enough and power always drained away. And, since the first days of his time there, he had had his own secrets. It was a long walk. From the Rue de Varennein the Seventh Arrondissement,the heart of Paris fashion, to the rented room on a street of Jewish tailors and little shops that made eyeglass frames, out past the Place R�blique,not far from the P� La-chaise cemetery. It took him about two hours, usually, though he could make it last somewhat longer than that and sometimes did. He was accompanied, for a time, by Marko,the bartender, and his nephew Anton, who washed the crystal and the china service. All three carried parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string--though Khristo's was rather heavier than the others'--the "extras" of the waiter's profession. The _sous chef__ had done the wrapping in the manner ofp�sserieclerks, who could fold paper into cones of sufficient strength that an elaborate pastrywould survive a child's trip to the store. Nestled inside the packets were slightly crumbled slices ofp�of wild duck in a game jelly, white asparagus spears, and thick cuts of tenderloin beef from the Limousin, carved to the English taste. In addition,Markokept a bottle below the bar to receive the remnants of the brandy service. The Beales had provided their guests with an Armagnac, aselect vintage of1896,and all three took sustenance from it now and again as they walked. They judged the party quite successful. Not a single fistfight and only two slaps--reportedly of political, not romantic, origin and therefore hardly worth discussion. The tulip-shaped elevator remained cranky, but no horrified shouts from between-floor guests had had to be attended to. Nobody jumped out a window, or set fire to the drapes, or tried to drink champagne by pouring it over female undergarments and squeezing them out like Spanish wine sacks. It was the Americans who drank from shoes, under the curious impression that romantic Europeans did such things. The chef, according to Anton, who worked in the kitchen, had been at his very best. Whistling and winking, he had performed with casual speed, directing his staff like a lion tamer in good humor. And hardly a curse all night long. This unusual sweetness of temper was attributed by the Bealestaff to his near ceaseless screwing of one of Madame's maids, a recent development. But which one? The shy little redhead from Quimper? Or the fulsome Italian, Tomasina, with haunches that could hurl a man into the air? Speaking of which, what of the naked Bealewoman? Would the society columns consider it thrilling ord�ass�I served her champagne,"Markosaid, in his sturdy Slavic French, "and her left tit looks toward Prague." Together, they walked nearly the length of the Boulevard St.-Germain, then Markoand Anton headed for their rooms by the Gare Austerlitz, the railroad terminal, while Khristo used the Pontde Sully to cross the river. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would take the Pont Marie. Well-learned instincts forbade the use of the same route night after night. One varied daily habits at every opportunity, one made prediction of time and place as difficult as possible, one did not, after all, shed Arbat Street quite so easily. His journey took him through the Marais, the Jewish quarter, a good place to quicken the footsteps. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew darker, the streets of the Maraisseemed to him more and more like a maze, a trap. At the northern border of the district he paused to warm up by the exhaust vents of a baker--who had fired his pine bough ovens an hour earlier--then headed for home. A battered little Simca crawled up the Rue du Chemin Vertbehind him, rather too slowly for his taste, and he stepped into a doorway and let it go past--eventually viewing the absurdly besotted driver with some amusement. But one had to be alert. _Do not forget everything,__ was the way he put it to himself. And he had not. He read the Russian�gr�pers, like thousands of others, with a hopeful heart. To the east, the NKVD--in fact die entire Sovietapparat--was stinging itself to death like a tormented scorpion as Yezhov, the redheaded dwarf, rolled down purge upon purge. Good! Let them rip each other to pieces, he thought. Let them sink into the swamp of bureaucratic confusion until not a single file remained in place. The simple defection of a junior intelligence officer would drift endlessly down their lists to the bottom of a clerical sea. Or so he hoped--though in fact he knew them much better than that. He had changed the parting of his hair, grown a thick mustache (all the Brasserie waiters in Paris had to be well furred in some fashion; it emphasized the sense of midnight deviltry the proprietors wished to encourage), and, with remorse, destroyed the clothing he'd worn in Spain. Now he had an old sheepskin jacket, bought ata _march�ux__puceson the outskirts of the city. Beyond that, there was fatalism. Refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany now came to Paris in a steady stream, he was but one among them. He worked hard at being _Nick the waiter,__ hid his money behind a loose light fixture in the hallway outside his room, and kept all acquaintance--with the exception of the Oma-raeff connection--emphatically casual. He didn't need much. He had his work, he had the city, and he had a great deal more than that. In the room, he undressed slowly, then made sure the shutters were firmly closed. The window faced east and the pale light of the winter sunrise would leak in through the slats, creating a shadow light that seemed to him peaceful and timeless. She was, as usual, pretending to sleep. But, if her eyes were closed, how did she sense the moment he was ready to enter the bed? Because it was, always, this very moment she chose to stretch and twist in such a way that she shaped her body for him in the softened outline of the blanket. "Aleksandra?" He spoke softly, standing by the bed. "I am sleeping," she said, unbothered by this, or any other, contradictory statement. He slid carefully between the sheets next to her. A moment later, just as sleep began to take him, her hand came visiting. "You are moving in your sleep," he whispered. "I am having a dream." "Oh." "A terrible dream." "What of?" "That certain things, indescribable things, are to happen to me, just at dawn, it is far too wicked even to describe... my heart beats..." "Very well. You must go back to sleep." "Yes. You are right." "Aleksandra?" "What?" "It _is__ dawn." "Oh no! Say it isn't!" Who was she? He was not entirely sure. Her passport gave her family name as _Varin,__ probably French, possibly Russian, and she claimed it was not the true family name anyhow. What he did know was that she wanted to be a mystery to him, wished him to see her as a creature of the Paris night, a manifestation, without the claustrophobic bonds of family or nationality. It was self-conscious artifice, transparently so, but she refused to leave its shelter. "Who are you, truly?" he'd asked more than once. "Ah, " she'd say, tristeas a nightclub singer, "if only one knew that sort of thing." She spelled her name in the Slavic form, implied exotic connections--emigrant communities in distant corners of Europe, Trieste perhaps--and claimed that her spirit, her psyche, was Russian. In support of such claims, she owned a few rich Russian curses that were occasionally hurled his way. She was small, waiflike, unsmiling, with a thick shag of muted blond hair that whipped her forehead when she shook her head and cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal. Her coloring he found strange--dark beneath pale--as though a shadow lived inside her. She had a hot temper, would go to war on the slightest provocation. But there was also in her a peasant sharpness that he found very familiar, an echo of his part of the world. She could leave the room with a few sous and return with the most extraordinary amount of stuff. She spoke a tough Parisian street French--calling him _"mec, "__ pal, when it suited her, in a hoarse, low voice--and bits and pieces of English she learned at the _cinema.__ Would surprise him with lines memorized from American movies in which men with pencil-thin mustaches dueled over business deals and won the heiress. "Now see here, Trumbull,"she would say, black beret pulled down over her mop head. She had been born in the countryside, she said, somewhere in the South of France, but of a family, she claimed, from _elsewhere.__ Arrived in Paris at sixteen, alone, without money, and survived. Her father, according to the time of day, had been a gangster, a poet, or a nobleman. She had never met him, she said, and had few memories of her mother--carried off by the influenza epidemic of1919.She had been raised by an aunt, or rather, a woman who called herself _aunt,__ or, perhaps, a woman who had known her aunt. None of her stories was ever told the same way twice and he finally gave it up--acknowledged inconsistency the only effective defense against a trained interrogator--and consigned her to the present moment, which was where she wanted to be in the first place. He had met her in a bookstore where she worked, lost in a billowing blue smock. She had fierce little hands, and he could not take his eyes off them as they whisked piles of books into order. She challenged him--What are you looking at?--he met the challenge. She demanded coffee. They went toa caf�He waited for her after work. Eventually, they returned to his room. The following day, she appeared at his door with a cardboard suitcase. "I have brought a few things," she'd said. She had, in her own way, taught him to be her lover. Using for instruction a great range of pouts and swoons and sly looks, attacks and retreats, an entire ragbag of stratagems. She teased him until he growled, then ran away. But not too far. Led him, subtly, to such special silky places as made her sing and showed him how, by example, to play lovers' games. She seduced him. Sometimes this way, sometimes that. With rainy-day melancholy or by getting absurdly drunk on two glasses of wine. "Did we do something vile? I swear I don't remember." She was clever at being "naughty" and making him "mad." Sometimes, pretending to immense modesty, she let him have a peek at something he wasn't supposed to see--quite by accident, of course, a stolen glimpse. She played at being his captive, squeaking for mercy. Or at being his captor, in the voice of a disciplinarian schoolteacher. At times, she was partial to costumes. Not intentional ones, it just happened that he would discover her in garter belt and silk stockings while she was _looking for her earrings.__ Other times, he would get in bed to find her in the chaste cotton shift of a schoolgirl, on which occasion she chose to address him as _uncle.__ She taught him this and she taught him that until at last it dawned on him that the only way a man ever becomes a lover is at the hands of a woman. Of her former lovers, whoever they might have been, he had no time to be jealous. The world seemed intent on rushing off its cliff, so, like everyone else, he lived for the moment and hung on tight. The lipstick grew crimson, hairdos were twisted about in bizarre shapes, and in some dresses a woman simply could not sit down. Affairs begun on Friday were over by Wednesday. And every woman in the world seemed to want him, sensing, he guessed, what went on in the little room. At Heininger, the screechy English girls pressed apartment keys into his hand, absolutely bent on having it off with the working class, and an evil-looking Slav at that. He smiled wistfully and returned the keys, regret for the lost opportunity showing clearly in his expression, hoping that such chivalry would spare him their anger. If he was tempted at all, it was the French women who caught his attention, especially the ones a few years older than he. It was the single glance on the street that undid him, gone in thevery last instant before it actually meant anything. His eyes would roam hungrily after them as they trailed their wondrous perfume away down the avenue, leaving him to sniff great nosefuls of Parisian air. What _was__ that? But Aleksandra, who smelled like soap, or lemons, or someone who had just been in the hot sun, was more than enough for him, so he prayed at one church only and, soon enough, woke to discover that love had got him.

In Vidin, the March wind blew in hard off the river, rippling the surface of the water and flattening the reeds that grew by the wooden dock. A few snow patches remained on the dirt street that ran past the waterfront shacks of the fishermen, and the two old people in dark clothing, a man and a woman, moved carefully around them, bodies bent against the wind. The woman wore a black shawl over her head and the man held his cap on with his hand. It was Sunday, and they were going home from mass. At the path that led through the garden to the house, they stopped. The woman pointed to a small skiff tied to a post among the reeds and said something to her husband. He shook his head, then shrugged. He did not know, he did not care. When they went into the house, there was a stranger sitting at the plank table near the stove. He wore the wool cap and clothing of a river fisherman. He stood up politely as they entered. "Please forgive me," he said in Russian, "for coming into your house without invitation." The woman recognized him then--he was the man who had taken Khristo away from Vidin--and her hands flew to the knot of her shawl. The old man stared at the stranger. "Who are you?" he said. "He is the Russian," his wife said. She let go of the knot, but her mouth was tight with anxiety. The old man continued to stare. Finally, as though he remembered, he said, "Oh yes." The woman opened the door of the stove, inserted a few sticks of oak branch and prodded the fire to life with an iron poker. She poured well water from a bucket into a kettle on the stove and spooned black tea into a battered copper samovar. Almostimmediately, the room grew warm and smelled sharp and sweet from the wood smoke. The Russian spoke gently to the old man. "Won't you sit down?" The man sat, took off his cap and placed it carefully on his knee, as though he were visiting the house, and waited for the other man to speak. From the wind, there were tears standing in the corners of his eyes. The Russian walked to the window, stood to one side, and looked out. "I came inside," he explained, "so as not to be seen by your neighbors. We know how things are going down here--I don't want to cause you trouble." The woman waited by the stove for the water to boil. "You will have tea," she said. "Yes. Thank you," the Russian said, and sat down. "I've brought you a letter. From your son." "From Nikko?" the old man said. The woman shifted the kettle noisily on the stove. "No," the Russian said. "From Khristo." The old man nodded. "Shall I read it to you?" the Russian asked. "Yes, please," the woman said, her back to the room. He reached inside his wool jacket and took out a square of paper, unfolded it carefully and smoothed it on the table. "There is no date, of course," he said, "but I am permitted to tell you that it was written last week." "I see," the old man said. His eyes narrowed and he nodded wisely, as though he well understood such complicated matters. "'Dear Papa,' it begins, 'I greet you. I write in hope that you and Mama and Helena are in good health and that the fishing is good this year. I am well, though I work very hard, and there is a lot to learn. I am successful at my school, and my superiors are pleased with my progress. All here join me in hoping that the day may soon come when I can return to see you. Please kiss Mama for me. Your son, Khristo.'" The old woman walked over from the stove and the Russian handed her the letter. She could not read, but she held it up to the light, then touched the writing. "Thank you," she said to the Russian. "Look." She showed the old man the letter. "It is from Khristo." He stared at the paper for a time, then said, "That's good." "He's doing very well indeed," the Russian said, taking the letter back. "Better than most of the others." "And he is in Russia?" the woman asked. The Russian smiled, apologetic. "I cannot tell you where he is. About that I am sorry, very sorry, because he would be proud for you to know it." "Oh," she said, disappointed. They were silent for a time, then the Russian relented. "He is in the place where he has always most wanted to go. But you must not tell anybody that." The woman returned to the stove, the water was just beginning to boil. "We do not speak of him," she said. "But you can surely guess," the Russian said. She thought for a moment. "He is in Vienna? Khristo?" "Perhaps," the Russian said. "Or Paris?" The Russian spread his hands in helplessness, he was not allowed to tell. "How he dreamed of such places," she said, shaking her head. She poured a thin stream of steaming water into the samovar. "We have never been to Sofia, even," she added. She left the tea to steep and went to her husband and squeezed his arm."Nicolai,"she said, "did you hear that? He is in a great cky. Vienna, or Paris, or somewhere." The old man nodded. "That's good," he said.

He woke at noon, lita Gitanefrom the packet on the night table, then lay back on the pillow and watched the blue smoke curl up to the ceiling. There was a neatly spun web in one corner of the ceiling, a small spider fussing at its center strands. Max, Aleksandra called him. Their house pet. Cigarette smoke seemed to affect Max, provoking him into a spasm of housekeeping. On the top of the dresser, the food from the party was laid out like a miniature buffet--though Aleksandra had pretty much done for the asparagus. The other item he'd brought home was lying, tossed casually aside, in a nest of string and brown paper. Aleksandra had gone off to work, at the bookstore near the Caf�loron the square in front of the church of St. -Germain-des-Pr� It was a communist-surrealist-anarchist-dadaist bookstore, a true Rive Gauche jungle of wild beards, curved pipes, black sweaters and sloe-eyed girls who stared. A serious place, at the geographical center of the city's artistic and political whirlpool, decorated with clenched-fist posters of all sorts. According to Aleksandra, all the local celebrities--Picasso, Modigliani, Jean Cocteau, Andr�eton--were seen there, as well as at their customary tables at the Caf�lor. Cigarette in hand, he rose naked from the rumpled sheets, padded across the cold floor, and opened the shutters. Above the rooftops, the sky was sharply blue, with white scud racing in from the Brittany coast. There was a pale girl who lived in a room across the street, Khristo had once waved to her as she shook a dust mop out the window, and she had waved back. Her shutter was closed this morning. By opening the window and leaning well out, he could see down into the street. Women with long breads in string bags. School kids in their uniforms coming home for lunch. One of the Jewish tailors, in yarmulke, black vest and rolled-up shirtsleeves, put his cat out the door of his shop. The air smelled like dust and garbage and garlic and March weather. Not a sign of last night's snow. He put on pants and shirt and went down the hall and used the toilet, then returned to the room, adjusted the shutters so that he could still see a slice of sky but no one could look in, and took the pistol from its brown paper nest. He lit another cigarette and propped it on a Suze ashtray and went to work. Broke out the magazine and examined it in the light. It was a 9mm automatic of Polish manufacture, designated wz/35 for the year of its design, called the Radom after the works where it was made. Large and heavy, it had an excellent reputation for dependability. He played with it for a time, discovering that what seemed to be the safety was in fact a slide lock that facilitated field-stripping the weapon. He took it apart, checked for burrs in the metal, found everything smooth and oiled. The wooden grip was scratched and nicked--the pistol had obviously been well used. He had�purchased the�pistol at Omaraeff's request--onecouldn't say no to one's friend _and__ boss--and it had been easy enough to find. He'd gone to the Turkish quarter, well out the Boulevard Raspail at the farthest reaches of the city. Found the rightcaf� the second try. Struck up a conversation with a man named Yasin (or so he said) who, for six hundred francs, had returned with the Radom after only a twenty-minute absence. Khristo now rewrapped the package, glanced at the clock on the table, finished dressing, and headed for the M�o. Omaraeff had told him they would be having lunch at a place called Bistro Jambol--a pleasant coincidence since Jambol was the name of a town in Bulgaria. But, when Khristo opened the steam-fogged door of the restaurant, he realized with horror that it was no coincidence at all. The smell of the _agneshki drebuhtki__--lamb innards grilled with garlic--came rushing up at him, along with the realization that he was standing in a roomful of expatriate Bulgarians while holding in his hand a Polish pistol wrapped in brown paper. He broke into a sweat. Of all the stupid places to go! Half the Paris NKVD would be hanging around. He took a small step backward, then a hand closed around his elbow. He looked behind him to discover a tiny waiter with slicked-back hair and a milky eye. "Omaraeff?"the man said. Khristo nodded dumbly. The man had a grip like a pincers--he felt halfway to the Lubianka then and there. "Upstairs," the man said in Bulgarian, nodding toward a rickety staircase on the far wall. At the top, tables were packed together on a balcony. "Nikko!" Omaraeff was beckoning violently. "Over here." He moved sideways through a sea of people--eyes rising to meet his own--talking, gesturing, observing his progress, all without missing a bite. "Zdrasti!"Omaraeff greeted him as he sat down. "May you live a hundred years--don't eat the lamb." Khristo stared at the hand-scratched Cyrillic on the ragged piece of paper that served as menu. A waiter filled the cloudy glass at his side with yellow wine that smelled like resin. "What, then?" "Try the _shkembe."__ Beef kidney cooked in milk. He ordered it, and the sweating waiter flew away. The room was dense with clouds of strong smoke from the black tobacco. Omaraeff smiled. "Just like home, eh, Nikko?" "Yes," Khristo said. "Just like home." Omaraeff described himself, with a smile, as a _circus Bulgarian.__ His enormous head was shaved smooth, and he wore a grand Turkish mustache, waxed to a fine point on either end. He looked like a strong man in a circus, an appearance that gave him great cachet as the headwaiter at Heininger. To this, for luncheon, he had added a pale gray linen suit and vest, set off by a lavender silk tie fixed in place by a stickpin of ruby-colored glass, the entire ensemble overlaid by a cloud of cologne that smelled like cloves. He took a long sip of the resinous wine and closed his eyes with pleasure. Suddenly, a dramatic melancholy fell upon him. "Ah Nikko, how sadly we wander this world." He raised his glass before Khristo's eyes, a symbol of good times gone away. "That's so," Khristo said, not wanting to be impolite. But he could see Omaraeff, in his mind's eye, taking supper in the Heininger kitchen before the late evening crowds arrived. A slice of white Normandy veal washed down with a little Chambertin. Surely he made the most of his exile. "Mark my words, boy, our time is coming soon enough." The _shkembe__ arrived, a vast plateful of it, reeking of rose pepper and sour milk and the singular aroma of kidney. Khristo poked it about with his fork and ate a boiled potato. "I've brought you a Radom," he said, gesturing with a glance toward the brown parcel by a dish of raw onions. "Good. It will speak for us. Speak to the world." "Oh?" "Mm," Omaraeff said, his mouth full of stew. He swallowed vigorously. "The _Bohhevhki__ press us too hard, eh?" He wiped his mouth with a large napkin and lifted his glass. "Czar Boris!" "Czar Boris," Khristo repeated. The wine was thick and bitter. Loud voices flared suddenly to life. He looked over the railing of the balcony and saw two old men with white beards who had risen abruptly from their table, upsetting a plate of yellow soup, which splatte Fed on the floor. "A prick on your grave!" one of the men shouted. "And on yours!" the other answered, grabbing him by the throat. Diners on all sides cheered as they choked one another. Waiters came rushing in to separate them, the tablewent over with a crash, several people wrestled in a heap amid the spilled food on the floor. Omaraeff shook his head with admiration. "Look at that old fart Gheorghiev, will you? All for honor. _Hit him, Todor,"__ he called over the balcony. _"Break the bastard's head!"__ He turned back to Khristo and punched a thick index finger into the brown package. "It's come to this now. You'll see." His fingernails were perfectly trimmed and had the opalescent shine produced by a suede buffer. "Perhaps you ought not to tell me too much, Djadja Omaraeff. Some things are best done in secrecy." Everyone called Omaraeff Uncle. "Not tell you? Not tell Nikko? Hell boy, you are the one who's going to do it!" "I am?" "You'll see." He raised his glass. "Adolf Hitler." "Adolf Hitler," Khristo repeated. They waited at a corner of the Boulevard St.-Michel, _the flics__ would not let them cross the street. Close ranks of marching men and women swept past them, chanting and singing. Omaraeff wore a topcoat that matched his suit, and the stiff wind toyed with the flaps as he stood at the edge of the pavement, eyes smoldering, hands jammed in pockets as though he feared they might reach out and smack a few heads. Khristo was bundled in his battered sheepskin jacket, and they looked for all the world like a well-to-do uncle and a wayward nephew, the latter having just recently been treated to a morally instructive lunch. "And which are these?" Omaraeff asked. His voice floated on a sea of contempt. "Medical students, I believe. The stethoscopes..." "Ah-hah. _Doctors."__ The word spoke volumes. A young man with an artist's flowing hair turned to them and raised his fist. "Red front!" he called out proudly. A thin fellow by his side added, "Join us!" His friend completed the thought: "Bring peace and mercy to all mankind!" Khristo imagined them in a room with Yaschyeritsa and smiled sadly at the thought. "Come on," the young man urged, observing the smile. A group of women in uniform--white hats and gray capes--marched below a banner stretched across the street: nurse workers FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. Omaraeff growled deep in his throat. "Go look up Comrade Stalin's rear end and see if you find justice," he said--Khristo laughed despite himself--"and powder his balls while you're at it." The nurses wore their hair severely cut, and their faces were plain and pale without makeup. He found them very beautiful. "Comrades," one of them called out, "have courage." _So God speaks to me,__ Khristo thought. He would need courage to contend with Omaraeff. You might know a man fairly well, he realized, then suddenly he revealed his politics and turned into a werewolf before your very eyes. Could not one be just a waiter? The nurses were followed by the municipal clerks, angry, shabby men and women with grim faces. One imagined piles of tracts in their houses, learned by rote, and shotguns in closets. _The day is coming,__ their eyes said. They would, Khristo knew, rule the world under Bolshevism--formerly despised, at last triumphant, paying back a list of slights that reached to heaven. "Who have we now?" Omaraeff asked. "The clerks of the city." "They look dangerous." "They are." Omaraeff was tight-lipped. "You see what we face. When the marching begins, the next thing is throwing bombs. Well, we'll put a stop to that. Trust Djadja. For a long time I averted my eyes. This is not my country, I reasoned, let them go to hell in their own way, what do I care?" "What has changed?" "Everything has changed. Now there are strikes, here, in England, even America. And posters, and parades. And those NKVD devils are everywhere, _stirring the pot.__ You know who I'm talking about?" "Yes." "Well then, you must share my view." "Of course," he said. Unconsciously, he shifted the packaged Radom to his other hand. "One might use it right now," Omaraeff said. "And to good effect." "Well..." "But I have bigger things in mind." There was a stir across the boulevard. A man in the crowd had shouted something that reached the marchers' ears, and one of them strode menacingly toward his tormentor. A policeman stepped out into the street and swung his cape--weighted with lead balls in the bottom hem. The marcher danced away and made an obscene gesture with an adamant thrust of both arms. The marchers, a battalion of streetsweepers, some of whom carried their brooms like rifles, roared their approval. They were followed by the salesgirls of the _grands__magasinsin their gray smocks. In their midst marched Winnie and Dicky Beale,arm in arm, faces set in pained but hopeful expressions, perfecdy in keeping with the emotional atmosphere of the march. They were, Khristo noted, smartly dressed for the occasion. Winnie Bealehad on a worker's peaked cap, properly tilted over one eye, and die squarish, broad-shouldered suit offered by Schiaparelli that was popular for communist events.Elsa Schiaparelli had journeyed to Moscow in1935to observe the workers' styles that would, it was felt, now take precedence in the fashion world. Dicky, careful always not to upstage his furiously _engage__ wife, had merely replaced shirt and tie with a turtleneck sweater beneath his London suit. Omaraeff shook his head in patient sorrow. "Lambs," he said. A half hour later, they stood across the street from an elegant six-story building on die Placede l'Op�, amid commercial luxury of every sort--marble banks, furriers, jewelers, andsoci�s anonymes. Money and discretion mingled in the afternoon air. The restaurant interiors were subdued and richly decorated, and the shop windows showed die latest colors, Wallis Simpson Blue and Coronation Purple. The people in the street were perfecdy bar-bered and smartly dressed, their complexions slightly pink after long, elaborate lunches. Omaraeff gestured toward the building with his head. "There it is," he said. "Murderer's gold." "That building?" "Yes. The top floor is owned by a firm called Floriotet eie.It is a gold repository, for those whose faith in banks did not survive1929--the Credit Anstaltfailure and all of that. In such times it can be very comforting to have some gold locked up in a private vault." "I see." "What you do not see is that the NKVD sells its gold there." Khristo's response was brusque. He was, for a moment, an intelligence officer once again, and asked the intelligence officer's eternal question: "How do you know?" "Friends, Nikko. Friendship is our gold. The newspaper kiosk on the corner is owned by an old man called Leonid, who was a banker in St. Petersburg until1917.Now he stands in his stall for sixteen hours a day, selling newspapers. And he is forced to watch Russians, coming and going at all hours, with black satchels. It is not so farfetched to say that it is his gold, formerly, that passes before his eyes. A cruel irony, but what can he do? He can come to Djadja Omaraeff, that's what he can do. And he has done it." "And what do you propose?" "I propose to take it from them." "And the pistol?" "Just in case. One may meet unfriendly persons anywhere, even in the Op�." "Who is to plan it?" "That's you, Nikko my boy." Khristo shook his head. He felt like a man sliding helplessly down a sheer slope toward the cliff that would kill him. "How would I know such things, Djadja? I am only a waiter." "Not a bad one, either, I've seen to that. What else does one know? Well, you are Bulgarian--but you are not in Bulgaria. Perhaps you do not like the situation there, the way the political wind blows. Yet you do not sit in the lap of the reds, either. You were in Spain, Vladi Z. has told me that, and I doubt you fought for the Falange. You are quiet, in great possession of yourself, everybody's acquaintance, nobody's friend. Markothe bartender tells me you take a different bridge across the Seine every night. And, at last, I ask you to get me a pistol--a test of friendship--and you do get it. And not at a pawnshop, either, I'll wager. What is one to think?" Khristo was silent. "Just so," Omaraeff said, and patted him affectionately on the shoulder. A cab dropped them off in front of a tiny nightclub called Jardin des Colombes--the Garden of Doves--in a cellar near Montparnasse. One panel of the mirrored wall opened onto a long corridor, full of turnings, that led to a small steam room. They were the only patrons. An old woman took their clothes and gave them towels, turned the steam vent up and shuffled away. They had reached the nightclub in the last hour of the afternoon, as twilight gathered in the side streets, already late for work at the Brasserie. Omaraeff wiped the sweat from his shaven head and waved concern aside. "You are with me, " he said grandly, "so you need not worry. Marko willget everything under way, and Papa Hei-ninger never shows his face until ten. Relax, my boy, relax. You'll work plenty in this life. Breathe deeply, take the steam inside yourself, let it cleanse this dirty city from your heart. Ach, Nikko, I was meant to live a country life--a little farm, a little wife, someplace in the mountains, where the birds sing at night." "Birds don't sing at night, Djadja." "On my place they would." "Will you permit me to advise you on this matter?" "No! Nikko, no, please. Don't spoil this lovely steam. " Khristo sighed and lay back on the bench until his head rested comfortably against the wall--the wood was spongy and soft from years of steam. Every man has a destiny, he thought, and this must be mine. Everyone in Vidin believed that life worked in that way. A man might kick and thrash and struggle all he liked--it counted for nothing. The old Turkish saying had it right: so it is written, so it shall be. Even now his mind toyed and played with the building on the Op�. The elevator. The hallways. Time of day. A crush of people. Where a car would go. How many couriers could be taken. If he read Omaraeff properly, the crime was a gesture of politics. Very well, a small act would suffice. Just pray God there was not a river of greed running silentlybeneath the enterprise. That would make it dangerous. The Russians would not trust their couriers, of course. Their consignments would be small. There would be watchers. They bled the gold wherever in the world they could get their needle in, and there was no point in turning it into roubles. Dollars, pounds sterling, Swiss francs--that's what they would want. With that, one might actually buy something. There was so much timing to do. Did they wait at the embassy to send the next courier until the last returned? Or was it a telephone signal? Oh why did not some great devil come to the surface of the world and suck them back to hell? Aleksandra! We must fly. "A little refreshment? Something to drink, perhaps?" He opened his eyes. "No, thank you." "You think too much, Nikko. You'll wear out your brains if you're not careful." Omaraeff stood, adjusted the towel at his waist, walked to the opposite wall and knocked twice, then returned to the bench. "I have arranged a small entertainment," he said, a slight edge to his voice. "Just something among friends--men of the world. You understand?" Ok God, whores, he thought. Omaraeff went too far--what he didn't need in his life right now was a dose of the ferocious Parisian clap. "I understand perfectly," he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. Let Omaraeff disport himself as he would--he had agreed to enough stupidity for one day, job or no job. One could always unload trucks at the market. The door opened and two naked boys appeared, perhaps fourteen, dark, sullen-faced, possibly Arab. "Ahh," Omaraeff said lightly, "golden youth." One of the boys walked toward Khristo and sat on his knee. "Get off," he said. The boy did not move for a moment, then stood obediently. "Dear Nikko, I fear I have insulted you." "Of course not. Every man to his pleasure." "Yes, yes," Omaraeff said. He took the other boy by the waist and turned him back and front, like an artist contemplating a sculpture. "Perhaps next time, little one," he said, dismissing him with a wave. "We must be paid," the boy said coldly in guttural French. "You will be paid," Omaraeff said. His voice sounded, for a moment, faded, used up. The boys left the room. Omaraeff lay back against the wall and closed his eyes. "So you see, Nikko my boy. Gold is everything." The Brasserie Heininger was quite mad that night, Khristo virtually ran from the moment he put on the waiter's uniform until the first light of dawn. It was a sumptuous place. One ascended a white marble staircase to find red plush banquettes, polished mirrors trimmed in thick gold leaf, and burnished copper lamps turned down to a soft glow. The brasseries had been started by competing beer breweries at the turn of the century and they retained a Victorian flavor, each one designed to be that ever so slightly vulgar place where one could behave in an ever so slightly vulgar way. A place where a glass of champagne might find its way down a daring cleavage. The waiters were blind to it, their expressions unchanging grins. "Be merry!" Papa Heininger insisted. They were always on the move, carrying silver platters of crayfish, grilled sausage, salmon in aspic. It was all far too overdone to be anything but deliriously cheap. A place to let your hair down. That night they had singing Germans, a table of fourteen, heavy red faces bawling out dueling songs as shoulders were thumped and backs thwacked with huge glee. They had an attempted suicide in the Ladies' Room. A Portuguese countess slashed her shoulder with a scissors, then howled for assistance before her dress was ruined. This was followed by a brief but excellent fistfight between two wine brokers from Bordeaux. Two American heiresses indulged themselves in a hair-pulling contest--something to do with a husband, one gathered from the accompanying shrieks. His Most Royal Highness the Prince of Bahadur descended the long staircase on his backside, a series of breathtaking bumps that ended with His Highness roaring with laughter--thank God--on the floor of the lobby. A night of madness, Khristo thought. Spring was coming, war was coming, perhaps nothing mattered very much. At dawn, in the room, Aleksandra sat pensively by the closed shutters, gray light spilling over her small breasts, the smoke from her cigarette rising lazily in the still air. Very quietly, he probed to see if he might get another job. There was no question of staying at Heininger if he denied Omaraeff assistance--the _padrone__ system demanded favors in return for favors, that was just the way life was. But the search proved useless. Paris was a village, in some ways no bigger than Vidin. Everybody knew everybody, through some connection or other, so if it happened that you were not known, you did not exist. The peculiar French mentality, a system of locks and gates and weirs so joyously flowing in the matter of sexual undertakings was, in the area of jobs and money--as the proprietor of a small bistro on the Ruede Rennesput it--plusserr�u'un cul de guenon. Tighter than a monkey's backside. Who were you? they wanted to know. They hired, it seemed, only cousins. First cousins. Before word of his research could reach Omaraeff, he gave it up. And went to work. Not committed to it, not really. Expecting along the way the usual impossibilities that snagged the vast percentage of all proposed clandestine actions. Ozunov, at Arbat Street, had cautioned: "Nine times out of ten the answer will be no. And of course you'll not be given any such thing as a reason." But so artfully fickle was the life of1937,it seemed to Khristo, that the great snag absolutely refused to reveal itself. The operational people turned up by Omaraeff were not at all the corps of baboons he'd feared. In fact, they did quite well. Pazar, the cab-driver, perhaps an Armenian or a Turk; Justine, the stunning French wife of a Russianchocolatier;Ivan Donchev, a quaint old gentleman born in Sofia who had lived forty years in Paris, a retired bookkeeper who wore a rosebud in his lapel*very day of his life. He ran them under a cover that was marginal at best, but you couldn't just tell people what was going on. It would give them, if nothing else, a story for _the flics__ if everything went entirely to hell. He presented himself as a confidential agent in the employ of a man who ran a courier service. The couriers had taken to dawdling, visiting their mistresses or gambling or drinking or _something.__ One had to know. Therefore these couriers would be closely observed on their routes. The story fooled nobody, of course, but it was there if they wanted it. In his heart he had to admit that he was happy inth�rk. He was slightly horrified to find it so, but there was no denyingwhat he felt. The incessant groveling of his job as a waiter had begun to grate on him, and he could foresee a time when he would come to hate it. Aleksandra noted the change immediately--her barometer was perilously accurate. "You seem awfully pleased these days, " she remarked, head canted at an inquisitive angle. "Perhaps you have another lover? Surely her bottom is cuter than mine. " Such impossibilities were duly and demonstratively denied, but she'd sensed that something was going on. "I am thinking of starting a business, " he told her. Oh? Did he think that rubbing shoulders withcaf�ciety made him one of them? No, no, nothing like that. He wished to better himself. "Ah, " she said. She believed she had some facility in the making of fashionablechapeaux, perhaps a small store, in a reasonably good neighborhood, where she could set up as a milliner. Her chum Lilianehad done that very thing, her _friend__ had arranged it. The bookstore was boring. The beards breathed Marxist endearments in her face. It was dusty among the shelves. She sneezed. Her wage was a humiliation. A business would get them out of this room into something more suitable. She would learn to cook. She would have a fatb�. In no time at all, they would be the most _grands__ of _bourgeoises.__ At which point she laughed wildly and grabbed the tip of his nose so hard in her savage little fist that his eyes wept and he knocked her hand away. "What are you doing, _petit__chou?"she asked, hard as nails and smart as a whip. "Money," he said, "it concerns money." She lit a cigarette and turned away. "Well, then," she said. But he knew she meant to find out the truth of it. There were four couriers moving from the Soviet embassy to the Floriot gold repository. They had no schedule, though charts were endlessly drawn up that clocked them and their visits. The operation seemed to him a hurried one. That made sense. What with Stalin and Yezhov attacking the Kulaks, the ongoing purges turning up treasure troves in walls and chimneys, and the infusion of Spanish bullion, there was a great deal of gold that needed converting. The observers were extremely faithful. Pazar sat by the hour in his cab, even when customers in the rain beat on his doors with umbrella handles and called him every sort of scoundrel. Justine shopped herself to exhaustion, wearing out two pairs ofshoes but never once complaining. Old Ivan bought coffees for his cronies ina caf�ross the street until he had to submit a plea for funds--and what oceans ofl'expressdid to his digestive system a gentleman would not care to describe. They called the couriers?,?,? and D. ? was a sad-looking fellow, with heavy jowls and downcast eyes, nicknamed Boris by the observers. He seemed to all of them so terribly unhappy, as though someone he'd loved had died. He stared at the ground as he carried his satchel through the streets, apparently caught up in a dialogue that went on in his mind. Sometimes his lips actually moved. To test his personality, Khristo ran a prostitute at him one afternoon on the Rue de la Paix, ashe returned from making a drop at Floriot. But Boris merely snarled under his breath and avoided her with a wide swerve. Apparently, the job would have to be done right on the street. The couriers were chained to their satchels, but a small channel-lock bolt cutter could sever the chain quickly enough. Otherwise, things went more or less well. There were the normal irritations, of course, especially the grave communications problem they experienced. Khristo determined, at that point, that one simply could not be any sort of spy in France because it was impossible to use the telephones. But, all in all, there was nothing very troubling--unless you counted the ham sandwiches. They all had to eat while on the job, and soon discovered that the grand establishments ofl'Op�itself would quickly deplete the operations fund provided by Omaraeff. But Pazar found a familycaf�dden away in a side street where a reasonable ham sandwich could be obtained--eaten on the premises or carried away. Khristo had lunch there, in the second week of April, and the proprietress made an offhand remark that rang a bell. "Suddenly all the world eats ham sandwiches--one can hardly keep the stuff in stock anymore." Someone else, it seemed, was eating ham sandwiches. But he couldn't spot them, though he gave it a try, and he hadn't the personnel to run surveillance on the gold repository _and__ thecaf�so he gave up and left it a question mark. Since the intelligence craft ran so close to life, it was subject to life's coincidences, thus one had to be a good soldier and march ahead, no matter how the hair on the back of the neck might rise. Spring came the third week in April. Blue rain slanted againstthe buildingfa�esand water streamed down the gutters, the parks smelled of earth when the sun came out for a moment, and a great unvoiced sigh seemed to rise from the city as a green cloud of buds appeared on the trees lining the boulevards. Aleksan-dra took her entire two-week salary off to the' pawn shop and emerged with a radio that worked, like a bad mule, if you beat it. The radio stations competed with one another to intensify the seasonal torment, sending out the saddest songs imaginable from Piafand the othercaf�ngers. Khristo discovered one station that played, sometimes, American jazz, and they listened to Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson's "I Must Have That Man" and Artie Shaw's sinuous "Begin the Beguine."Such music made both of them feel sexy and ineffably sad in the same moment and they made love like lovers in gothic novels. Meanwhile, the city's deep political malaise, its sense of doom, was now conjoined with the pangs of April and some were overheard to call this time _our final spring.__ In the mornings, Khristo smoked Gitanesand collated observer reports to the sound of the pattering rain. He could find no firm structure in the courier system. They were never together. They took the same route from embassy to repository and home again. The walk took about fourteen minutes. Once at the Floriot repository, the couriers were held up for twenty minutes or so for the inevitable clerical ceremonies--a highly developed French specialty--then took another fourteen minutes to return. During the forty-eight-minute round trip, other couriers sometimes started off on their routes, but all four had never yet operated simultaneously. He studied the covert photographs his operatives had taken. Four unremarkable men in baggy suits. Probably armed. To take one of them would not be too difficult--a kidnapping off the street by hooded toughs. If they found a safe place to hold him, they might reasonably wait the remainder of the forty-eight minutes to see if another courier started out, but each variation on the theme would, of course, substantially increase the danger. There would be police, a lot of them, and they would arrive quickly. For the finale of the surveillance, old Ivan was sent to the top floor of the building with a pair of gold candlesticks while one of the Russians was subjected to the clerical hocus-pocus. Ivanattempted to haggle over the price and made a thorough pest of himself for a time sufficient to observe an exchange through the security grille, then took his candlesticks and went off in a huff. The banknotes were delivereden paquet,butthe Russian--the sorrowful Boris, as it happened--insisted on counting the money, and Ivan had silently counted right along with him. It came out to more than ninety thousand francs. At the equivalent of$14.28U.S. an ounce, the European standard, he had converted almost twenty pounds of gold. One wet afternoon, Khristo walked with Omaraeff in the Pare Monceau--two black umbrellas moving slowly along the graveled path--and reported to him at length. Gave him a summary of his findings and a set of photographs. After some desultory conversation, they shook hands and parted. At the gate to the park a blind veteran, the breast of his old corporal's tunic covered with medals, stood silently in the drizzle holding a mess-kit plate before him. Khristo put a one-franc coin in the plate and the man thanked him solemnly in an educated voice. He had an hour before work, so he bought a _Figaro__ and stopped ina caf�d ordered a coffee. He put a sugar lump on the miniature spoon, lowered it just beneath the layer of tan foam, and watched it break into tiny crystals. He was glad the business for Omaraeff was done with; he believed he'd carried it off reasonably well, without getting his hands too dirty. From here on, they were on their own. The surfaces of thecaf�ndows were steamy, people going by in the streets looked like shadows. The front pages of Le Figarowere dense with reports of a world in flames: Japanese bombers taking a terrible toll of the Chinese population in Manchuria, the Spanish city of Guernica virtually obliterated by the German pilots of the Condor Legion, Nazi storm troopers in Berlin, standing outside Jewish-owned department stores with rubber stamps and inkpads and forcing shoppers to have their foreheads stamped. Mussolini had made a major speech in Libya, voicing Italian support for Islamic objectives. Bertrand Russell had advised the British public to treat German invaders as tourists, stating, "The Nazis would find some interest in our way of living, I think, and the starch would be taken out of them." The local news concentrated on the particularly horrible murderof an Austrian refugee up in Montmartre. The refugee, Hugo Leitzer, had been a resident of one of the cheap hotels in the district used almost exclusively by prostitutes. At four in the afternoon he was seen to stagger through the lobby with an icepick driven fully into his chest. He had managed to run out into the street, where he'd collapsed to his knees and pulled the weapon out as cars swerved around him. A "heavy man in his forties, wearing a sailor's sweater," had run out of the hotel, retrieved the icepick, and stabbed Leitzer "at least six times" before the eyes of horrified onlookers. By the time police arrived, the man had disappeared and Leitzer had bled to death. The story was accompanied by a passport photo of Leitzer. It was Kerenyi, the blond Hungarian from Esztergom known as Plow-boy, who had trained with Khristo at Arbat Street. He was exhausted when he got back to the room the following morning. He peeled off his clothes and dropped them on a chair, then slid carefully under the covers so as not to wake Aleksandra. But she was only pretending to sleep. "You are so late," she said. "I fell asleep waiting." "It's madness there. Everyone orders champagne at dawn. With strawberries. Of course the old man doesn't chase them away--he shakes them by the ankles to make the last sou fall out." "Strawberries? In April?" "From a greenhouse." "Like roses." "Yes. The price, too, is like roses." "Did you bring me some? You may feed them to me in bed." "Sorry. The patrons ate every last one." "Swine!" "They pay the rent." "Little enough. They live like kings--we crawl in the dust." "Aleksandra..." "I'll say anything I like." "Oh yes?" "Yes." "Final warning." "I tremble with fear." "You shall." "No! Get your--" "Bad. . . little. . . girls..." "Help! Stop!" He very nearly did. Would have, had she not let him know, silently, that she wished to be courteously ravaged. How she owned him! He marveled at it. Rejoiced in it even as their mood, their simultaneous appetite, began to shift. Next, she was hungry. It meant they had to get dressed all over again and go out in the rain, joining the early workers in thecaf�nthe corner. Every eye went to Aleksandra as they entered. She peered out at the world from beneath a yellow straw hat--a "boater," with circular crown and flat brim--wore a green wool muffler looped around her neck, and was lost in the immensity of Khristo's sheepskin jacket while he made do with a heavy sweater. To top it off, she was smoking a thin, gold Turkish cigarette. The workingmen in thecaf�knowledged her entrance with great affection. She was so _titi__--the classic Parisian street urchin, given to storm-blown passions yet impossibly adorable--towing her coat-less lover intoa caf� early in the rainy morning, so delighted with her own eccentricity yet so vulnerable--blond shag hanging down to her eyes--that every one of them felt obliged to desire, her. For she was, if only for a moment, some girl they'd once loved. Khristo and Aleksandra seated themselves at a small table by the window, shivering as the warm air drove out the chill, inhaling the luxurious morning fog of strong coffee, tobacco smoke and bread. "Two breakfasts, please," Khristo said to the owner when she came out from behind the bar. She was back in a moment with bowls of milky coffee, a _flute__--the slimmest loaf with the most crust--cut into rounds, and saucers of white butter and peach jam. It took both hands to hold the coffee. They polished that off in short order and ordered two more."Pauvres!"said the owner from behind the bar, meaning310?poor starving things,a fine Parisian irony twinkling in her tight smile. It was her divine right aspropri�ireof thecaf� make fun of them a little--I know why you're so hungry. To the second breakfast she added, unbidden, two steamingbowls of soup. Last night's, no doubt, and all the better for having aged. When these did not appear on the bill, Khristo began to thank her but she tossed his gratitude away with a flip of the hand. It was her right to feed them, to play a small role in their love affair. These were some of the sacred perquisites of the profession, to be dispensed at her whim. Aleksandra took his hand on the way back to the room, tugged him off in a new direction just before they reached the door of their building. Steered him to a small park in the neighborhood, but it was too wet to sit down. When he pointed this out, she accused him of being unromantic. He sighed and went off toa _tabac__and returned with a newspaper, which he divided and placed on the wet bench. She took his hand again as they sat with the rain misting down on them. "We will certainly catch cold," he said. "Lovers don't care about a little rain," she said. He turned her face toward him and kissed her on the lips. "I am in love," he said softly, sliding his arm beneath the sheepskin coat and circling her waist, "but I am getting wet." "Some ferocious Bulgar you turned out to be. Whose ancestors rode the steppes." "Those were Mongols." "Oh? Well then, what did the ferocious Bulgars do?" "Stayed dry," he said, "when they could." Back in the room, they rubbed each other dry with the rough towels the landlady provided for a few francs extra each week. Khristo looked up as heavy footsteps moved down the corridor past their door. "Who is that?" He was used to the light step of the spinster, a retired piano teacher, who had rented the room at the end of the hall. "A new tenant," Aleksandra said. "Mademoiselle Beckmannhas gone to join her sister in Rennes." "Oh?" "Yes. Madame told me yesterday when she came for the rent. The new lodger is called Dodin. I saw him move in." "He walks like an ox." "He looks like one as well. He is broad, wide as a door. And he has big red hands, like a butcher. He tipped his hat to me." "He sounds strange." She shrugged. "Sit down and I will dry your hair. God made you too tall." He sat on the bed while she rubbed his head with a towel. "He is just a man who lives in rooms," she said. "So do I." "Well, he is the sort who does, I mean. You just happen to." "Perhaps we should find another room." "Because of Dodin?" "No, not exactly. A change of scene, perhaps." "I like it here," she said. "It is ours." "As long as he doesn't bother you." "Don't worry about that." She adjusted his head by pulling on his ears. "I am used to big oxes." She had small breasts, they moved as she dried his hair and he touched them. "Be good," she said, wriggling away from his hands. But he pulled her down on the bed next to him and, when she began to say the sort of things that always provoked him, when she began to tease him, he stopped her and made love to her in a way that was not their usual fashion. He made love to her from the heart, and when it was over she had tears in her eyes and he held her so tightly that his hands hurt.

On the first day of May the weather sparkled, bright blue and perfect, a day just barely warm enough to leave one's coat at home. Ivan Donchev set his homburg at the proper angle and gave the bottom of his vest a final tug. In the hallway mirror, his image was precisely as he wished: an older gentleman but well kept, shoulders set square, chin held high. He had only a minor role in the day's drama, but he meant to play it flawlessly and with style. Outside his apartment building, he stopped at the flower cart and bought his usual rosebud, white for today, and adjusted it carefully in his buttonhole. He considered a taxi, but it was May Day and many of the drivers would be marching. Huge demonstrations and parades were expected in central Paris, busloads of police had been drawn up since before dawn in the side streets off the Rue de Rivoli. So he walked. It took him more than two hours but he enjoyed every minute, flirting with the passing ladies, patting the occasional dog, swimming easily in the stream of city life as he had done for forty years. He barely remembered Sofia, where he had grown to manhood, yet distance and time had somehow contrived to strengthen his patriotism. Besides, one could not exactly say no to Omaraeff. When something went awry in the�gr�mmunity, Djadja was the court of last resort and almost always found a way to put things right, thus he was not a man to be casually turned aside. Just after3:00p.m.,Ivan Donchev took up his position on the Placede l'Op�,in front of Lancel, its windows superbly decorated with gold and silver and Bakelitejewelry nesting among dozens of spring scarves. When the door opened, one could smell perfume. He quite loved this store, though its merchandise was well beyond his means. The women who swept in and out of its doors were delicious, he thought, each one showing off her own special flair. He was, for women in general, a very good audience, offering now and again an appreciative nod and a tip of the hat, which sometimes drew a smile in return. Some blocks away, in the direction of the Rue de Rivoli, he could hear snatches of song and the occasional roar--quite muted by the time it reached his ears--of a huge crowd. Now and then, the high-low song of a police siren cut through the low rumble of the marchers. Omaraeff had, he was certain, chosen to act on May Day for two reasons: the evident symbolic value, as well as the fact that police cars would be well snarled up by the demonstrations. He strolled back and forth in front of the store, glancing at his watch, a man anticipating the reappearance of a woman occupied with shopping. He looked about him, discreetly, but could identify none of his confederates. That was all to the good, he thought, it indicated a professional approach to the matter. At sixteen minutes past the hour, the man he awaited came toward him from the Rue de la Paix. His mouth grew dry, and he felt his heart accelerate. _Be calm,__ he told himself. What he had to do was simple, there was no question of making a mistake. The man with the black satchel moved at the pace of pedestrian traffic. He seemed, as always, terribly morose. He slumped, his shoulders sagged, his jowls drooped, his eyes were lost behind thick, ill-fitting eyeglasses. Well, he would be even less happy in a moment, Ivan thought. As the courier walked past him, Ivan gathered his wits and rehearsed himself one final time. He let the man go by, waited as he gained some small distance, then ran after him at a trot. "Wait a moment!" he called out in Russian, waving his hand. The man hesitated, paused, then looked over his shoulder at Ivan, hurrying to catch up with him. "Please, sir, a moment," Ivan called. From a taxi parked by the curb and from the doorway of a restaurant, two men appeared. He had never seen them before but there was no mistaking their trade. They were thick, bulky men who moved gracefully. One of them grabbed the courier's left arm. The courier swung his satchel. A woman screamed. Several people started running. The other man grabbed the satchel but the Russian was strong and swung him around. Ivan stood motionless, watching the drama. The three men struggled for a moment, all tangled up with one another, it seemed. A loud voice demanded that the police appear at once. A woman coming out of Lancel lost a shoe, then stood hopping on one foot, trying to put it back on. From the driver's seat of the taxi a hand appeared, holding an automatic pistol. There was a flash and a crack, then another, then three or four more in rapid succession. The courier leapt into the air as Ivan watched, transfixed. Then a bee stung him in the armpit and he began backing away hurriedly. What a moment for such a thing to happen! He saw the courier on the sidewalk, a handful of pamphlets sprayed across his chest, his satchel gone. The other two men were disappearing into the taxi as Ivan turned away and trotted off. A siren approached in the distance. He was, at this point, supposed to go home. But he didn't feel well. His left arm was numb, and he had now come to realize what had happened to him. Still, it couldn't be terribly serious, and the most pressing need at the moment was to remove himself from the immediate area. There was a small cinema just off the avenue and he paid and went in, letting the usher guide him to a seat on the aisle and remembering to tip him. Of the movie he could make little sense. A man and a woman lived in poverty on a barge that sailed up and down the river Loire. They were lovers, but the anguish of the times was driving them apart. The girl was called Sylvie. She had hooded eyes and a down-curved, unhappy mouth. When she lit a cigarette, she watched the match burn almost to her fingertips before blowingit out. This she did continually. Her lover was called Bruno--was he German?--a rough sort who wore a sleeveless undershirt and a neck scarf. Only one thing interested him, that was clear. But he was too much the primitive for Sylvie, abarbarian who thought himself clever. Ivan kept moving about in the seat, trying to get comfortable. His skin felt clammy and there was a hot point beneath his shoulder blade that seemed to move about, as though the bee had burrowed well in and was now building a hive. He checked his watch. Amazing! Only fifteen minutes since he had hailed the courier. Much too soon to be out on the street. He settled himself back in the seat and tried to concentrate on the film. A vagabond, a stooped old man with a wild beard, had joined the couple. Sylviekept staring at him from a distance, as though she had encountered him in a past life. Bruno noticed this but said nothing about it. He drank wine with the vagabond, who began to tell a story about a traveling circus. The movie was definitely making him drowsy. A dog at the edge of the river barked at the moon. The vagabond cleaned his nails with a long knife. Bruno grabbed Sylvieby the arm and the camera showed his fingers pressing into her skin. It didn't matter much to Ivan. His chin kept dropping onto his chest, then he would snap awake. The idea of an old man sleeping in a movie house in the middle of the afternoon was very depressing, simply not the sort of thing he would do, but there seemed to be no way to avoid it. They didn't find him until after midnight, when an usher came down the aisle to wake him up and couldn't. On his way to work, Khristo saw the headlines: DIPLOMAT SOVIETASSASSIN�LA MORT A VISIT�'OP�a! JOUR DE MAI EST JOUR DE MORT POURDIPLOMATSOVIET There were photographs. It took him a moment to recognize "Boris, " a dark shape tossed carelessly on a gray pavement. He stood in a small crowd in front of the kiosk and read the secondary headlines and lead paragraphs. Trotskyist pamphlets had beenfound on the body of Dmitri Myagin, assistant culturalattach� the Soviet embassy. Ivan Donchev, a Bulgarian citizen but long a resident of the city, had been discovered dead of a gunshot wound in a movie theater near the site of the assassination. The DST, the French internal security service, was treating the death as associated with the Myagin shooting. All�gr�oups in the city would be questioned regarding the incident. An anarchist splinter party, LEC(Libert��alit�Communit� had claimed credit for the action. The Soviet ambassador, in a written statement, had decried violence and murder in the streets, and lawlessness in general, as maladies of an oppressive capitalist system. What would be said to the grieving widow? The fatherless children? Khristo, standing in the sunlight, went cold. Fools. Who could not accomplish a simple street robbery without killing. And old Ivan--what in God's name had Omaraeff been thinking of, to permit an innocent like that in the vicinity of an action? The assassins reportedly fled in a taxi. Was that Pazar? In his own taxi, perhaps? It was unspeakable. Nobody could be that stupid. There had been a good chance that a simple, quiet robbery might not even have been reported by the Russians--one little crime was nothing compared to their obsession with gold--for it would have imperiled the operation at Floriot. But murder, in front of witnesses, in the middle of the afternoon, in a good neighborhood, with obvious Balkan overtones--that would stir up the newspapers for weeks and the police would be forced into making a serious effort. And the searching finger, he knew, would be scratching at his door soon enough. The Russians would find a way to break into the investigation--the Paris NKVD residency surely had its friends in the DST. Perhaps his passport photo was being studied by the police right now. His assumed identity would not hold up under scrutiny--Omaraeff had seen through it easily enough. In addition, the death of Kerenyi ona Montmartrestreet still gnawed at him. He wasn't at all the type to look for a fight in a whorehouse. He too might have defected--from Spain or wherever they had sent him after Arbat Street--and hidden out in Paris. If the man who'd killed him was a Spetsburo assassin, evidence pointed to a desire for publicity. An _icepick.__ The Russians knew all about newspapers. Perhaps they were sending a message, trying to panic other fugitives in Paris. Perhaps they had succeeded. He was ice cold, but a droplet of sweat ran down his side, and there was a claw in his stomach. He had money, hidden in the light fixture in the hallway outside his room. Perhaps they could run. Where? Into Germany? Into Spain? That was madness. Holland, then, or Belgium. Very well, then what? They would have to work soon enough. That meant permits, and police, and no Omaraeff to smooth the way. But if the murder of Ke-renyi had been NKVD work--and the more he thought about it the more he knew he had to make that assumption--it was intended to flush the game, to make the rabbits run. Thus, if he ran, he was playing into their hands. They would snap him up. And he knew what came next. By the time he was pounding up the Rue du Bac, afew blocks from Heininger, the blackness had come down upon him hard. Everything he had so carefully pieced together, from love and work and a few tenuous dreams, was trembling in the wind. How flimsy it was, he thought. Built on sand. How he had deluded himself, that he could make what he wanted out of his life. It wasn't so. "Dear boy." He stopped dead and looked for the voice. It came from an open two-seater, a forest green Morgan parked at the curb. Recognition arrived a moment later--the reddish hair swept across the noble brow, cool eyes shadowed with dark makeup. The man who had given him his card at Winnie Beale's birthday party on the Rue de Varenne. "'Lothere, Nick. Come sit with us a minute, will you?" It wasn't precisely a request. He walked around the back of the car and climbed in. The upholstery on the bucket seat was worn smooth with time and care and smelled like old leather. "Roger Fitzware. Remember me?" They shook hands. "Yes," he said. "At Madame Beale's house." "You were going to come 'round and get your picture took, you bad boy." Khristo shrugged. "I am sorry," he said simply. "No matter, no matter. Everybody's so blasted busy these days. Even old Nick, eh?" "Yes. Even now, I was going to work." "Oh let's steal a minute, shall we? First of all, you must say 'congratulations.'" "Congratulations, Mr. Fitzware." "Plain Roddy, dear boy. And I thank you. Seems I've got me a job. Of all things! The old family back in Sussex would absolutely perish from the shock if they heard, but there it is." "I am glad for you." "Thank you, thank you. Sort of a society column kind of a thing, it seems, fellow wasn't all that clear about it. 'Just a few tidbits, dear boy,' he says. 'The odd _item,__ y'know, who's been with who and what did they do and what did they say and so on and so forth.' You know the sort of thing?" "Yes, I think so. Tid, bits." "That's it!" "And from me you want...?" "Tidbits, dear boy. Just as you said. You're in the way of finding out all sorts of things, aren't you. One goes here and one goes there and one finds old Nick choppin' up a salmon, eh? It's a natural, that's what I say. Here you are, having to listen to every sort of prattle all day and half the night, now here's the chance to make the odd franc at it. Oh say yes, Nick, I'd be truly grateful." "I'm sorry, Mr. Fitzware. I must not do such things. My job...." "Dear boy! Don't even think it. You must, y'know, really you must." Khristo--not Nick the waiter at all--gave him a long look. Fitzware sat casually, half turned, at the wheel of the Morgan, his dark blue blazer--double-breasted and stoutly made--hung perfectly, and the striped tie meant something, though Khristo wasn't sure exactly what. A man who had everything he wanted, yet his face was tense and pale, in fear, evidently, that he would receive no tidbits. "I must?" "Yes, well, damn it all, Nick, there it is. You must." "Be your spy, you mean." "Dear boy, such language." "But that is what you mean. Who goes in bed with who. What people say when they drink too much. Who doesn't pay their bill at the restaurant. That is what you want from me. And you will pay for it." Fitzware, in one fluid motion, produced a thin pack of hundred-franc notes from somewhere, laid it on Khristo's knee, and patted it twice. "Smart lad," he said, in a voice entirely different from the one he always used. Khristo picked up the banknotes, wet the tip of his thumb, counted them--there were twenty--folded the sheaf twice, to make it a thick wad, then reached across the car and stuffed the money in the breast pocket of Fitzware's blazer. "Well. Now you've surprised me, Nick. And you can't imagine how difficult it is to surprise me." His eyes were wide and unmoving, like an insulted cat. "I'm sorry, Mr. Fitzware. But I must go to work now." "Last thing. Have a look in the glove box, will you?" Khristo turned the knob and the wooden panel fell open. There was an envelope lying flat on the felt interior. He opened it up and looked at the photograph. Saw himself sitting on a wooden bench, wearing only a towel, with a naked boy on his knee. "Shocking, eh? Not to worry, Nick. Your little secret is safe with me. _Hani smt__qui mal y penseand all that, love makes the world go round, variety the spice of life. Dear boy, one couldn't guess what goes on in wicked old Paree." Khristo smiled. Stopped himself just short of open laughter. "Omaraeff is yours?" "Oh, who is anybody's anymore, really. Just that friends do each other favors now and again. Makes the wheels run smooth." He handed the photograph to Fitzware. "To remember me, you keep this, _dear boy,"__ he said. "Don't you realize...?" "This trick works, Mr. Fitzware, only if there is somebody to show the picture to. Who will you show? Omaraeff? Papa Heininger--what would he think of you, to take such a picture?--or perhaps my lover? She would be surprised, perhaps, or a little sad maybe, or she might laugh. With her, you see, it's hard to tell. Good-bye." He got out of the car and closed the door carefully. Walked away leisurely down the street. "Damn your eyes," he heard behind him. Again, not the usual nasal whine, not at all. Real British fury--a voice he'd never in fact heard before. The heat of it surprised him. At Heininger, a few minutes after five, he saw Omaraeff enter the restaurant, a newspaper folded under his arm. His face was rigid. Khristo stared at him, but he refused to make eye contact. The regular patrons, who filtered in just before midnight, were excited by the news of the moment and the waiters found themselves momentary celebrities. "Uh-oh, here comes Nick. Quick everybody, under the table!" He grinned at them tolerantly and shook his head--these grinning aristocrats who kidded him with their hands formed into children's revolvers. In honor of the assassination they called out _"Nazhdrovia!"__ as they guzzled their champagne and tried on a variety of Eastern European accents for his benefit. Omaraeff stood at attention before the roast with a long knife, directing an assistant to wrap up a nice fatty rib for the deerhound of a favored customer, and accepted the tireless joshing with a thin smile. Later that night he sliced his thumb to the bone and had to be taken off to a doctor. As Khristo hurried to and from the kitchen, his mind wandered among the small, insignificant events of the past week. Simply, there were too many of them--he felt like a blind man in a room full of cobwebs. There was Dodin, the new lodger. The blind veteran in the Parc Monceauwith an educated, cultured voice--wearing a _corporal's__ tunic. Small things, ordinarily not worthy of notice. The death of Kerenyi. Sad, surely, and perhaps without meaning. The clumsiness of the gold theft. Ineptitude could be, he knew, an effective mask for intentions of great subtlety. He feared that something was gathering around him, strand by delicate strand, and that, when its presence was at last manifest, it would be one instant too late to run for freedom. At three-thirty in the morning he went home, walking quickly, head down. Reaching his building, he felt a stab of panic--foreknowledge--and rushed up the stairs to the room. He threw open the door to find darkness and silence. He was silhouetted, framed in the doorway, and he flinched, moved sideways against the wall just as the timed light in the hallway went off with a pop. In total blackness, he closed his eyes in concentration and raised his hands before him. He could hear, faintly, the sound of labored breathing. A match flared and a candle came to life. Aleksandra, dark-under-white skin glowing amber in the tiny flame, moved toward him in a trance. A piece of rope was knotted low on her waist. She stared at him blindly, lips drawn back, teeth exposed. As in a dream, her hand reached out, fingers curved into talons, and she spoke very slowly, in English shaded by the harsh accents of the Balkans. "Velcome to my castle," she said. Later, as he lay awake in the tangled bedding, he heard the heavy footsteps of the new lodger as he walked down the corridor. The next day, and for a week thereafter, in the section of Le Figarowhere various Bureauxde Matrimonielisted the virtues of their clients, the following advertisement appeared: #344--Monsieur B.F., a prosperous gentleman owning82.5hectaresof farmland in the Haut-Vienne,wishes to meet a woman of honesty and sincerity. Monsieur B.F. is recently widowed and quite youthful in appearance, and will treat all enquiries with discretion. Please write, describing desirable arrangements for meeting, to#344,Bureaude Matrimonie Vigeaux,60Rue St.-Martin. He received four responses. The first three were handwritten notes on inexpensive formal paper. Annette scented hers witheau de violettesand would meet him for tea at the house of her mother.Fran�se,age thirty-nine, wrote in purple ink, including precise directions to her family home near Porte d'lvry. Suzi suggested dinner at any restaurant "of good standing" he might choose. The fourth letter was typed. "Iliane" would be pleased to meet him on the third Sunday in June, at2:00p.m.,at the P� Lachaisecemetery, by the crypt of Maria Walewska--Napoleon's Polish mistress. Moving down the gravel paths among the black-clad French families, a small bunch of anemones in his hand, he saw Ilya Goldman standing contemplatively by the Walewska tomb, a small, gray temple-like structure with an iron railing across the front. Even from a distance, Khristo could see the changes. Formerly boyish and exuberant, Ilya had grown older than his years. He wore a well-cut suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket, a soft gray fedora, and a black mourner's armband. His hands were clasped behind his back. Up close, there were lines of fatigue around his eyes, and when Ilya greeted him--they spoke Russian, as always--he seemed to animate his face with effort. They shook hands warmly, embraced, then spent a moment without words staring together at the Walewska tomb. "Well then," Ilya said at last, "what is the report from SHOEMAKER?" "SHOEMAKER?" "Yes, we are using professions, lately, for operational names. Even Banker and Moneylender. Out of deference to me, I think, the latter is not simply Jew." "Ah. Who am I, then?" "A countess, of obscure origin and terribly poor, alas. With a French fascist for a lover, naturally. Very gamy stuff. Their views on lovemaking are quite. . . unusual. You would enjoy reading about it." "You've had somebody watching the Matrimoni�all this time?" "Oh yes. Since the day after you left Spain, in fact. Don't be too flattered, though. We have many hands, and the busier they are kept, the less mischief they cause us." "Ilya, I must ask you. Are they getting close to me?" He didn't answer for a time. "They are looking, I can promise you that. Looking hard. But I am not in the Paris residency, you see, and I don't know what they're doing here. For the purposes of SHOEMAKER I am permitted to travel. Now, at my _reziden-tura__--Copenhagen at the moment, but I may be moved any day--you are safe enough. We have a very long list. Since the _Yezhovschina__ purges we seem to leak defectors everywhere. Finding them takes a cursed amount of time." "And you? How safe are you?" He shrugged. "Who can say, who can say. They've shot ninety percent of the army generals, eighty percent of the colonels." "Who will fight the war?" "There won't be one. Stalin will keep us out of it, I can promise you that. We haven't the officers to fight a war. There are some who say that the doubt cast on the loyalty of the army--generals' plots and what have you--was in fact the work of German intelligence, Reinhard Heydrichand his so-called intellectual thugs. Quite good they are, quite, quite good. Meanwhile, on our side, the old guard is just about gone. Berzin, who ran things so well in Spain, was recalled 'for discussions. ' He went, thinking that all could be _explained,__ and they killed him, of course. AUthe Latvians, in fact--Latsis, Peters, the whole crowd. The Chekist Unschlikht is dead. Orlov has defected and is said to be writing a book. A grand housecleaning has been undertaken. All the Poles, Hungarians, Germans. We're to be quite thoroughly Russian in future." "Will they purge Romanians?" "Like me, you mean." "Yes." "One would suppose so, though here I am. Hard to say for how long. However, I do not intend to die. And that's where you come in, my friend. The time may come when I will need your help. I sleep a little better having a friend on the outside, someone I can trust, for the day when I have to scamper." "You saved my life in Spain. Anything you want..." "Thank you. They realized you had been warned--Maltsaev and his pals--but they stuck that one on Lubin." "Did his family connection save him?" "No. They died too. One is never quite sure which way it will go" Khristo mused for a time, then shook his head. "We should kill him, Ilya. Somebody should." "Stalin? The Great Father? Yes. Will you do it, Khristo? Die for the good of all mankind?" "If I thought one could actually get at him, perhaps I would. By joining the Guards division or something of that sort." "A little late for you to join the Guards division." "He must be insane. A mad dog." "No, you are wrong about that. That's what Europe thinks--those who aren't in love with him. Here he might be mad, but in truth he is no more than that lovable old character, the wicked peasant. I'm sure you've known one or two. He hits his neighbor on the head, steals his gold, rapes his wife, and burns his house down. Who knows why. If he is reproached, he swears that a fiery angel forced him to do it." They strolled for a time, two acquaintances in mourning, through the maze of pathways lined tightly with the tombs of aristocrats and artists, some of which had received Sunday flowers. "What of the others?" Khristo asked. "Well, Kulic is alive." "Was he arrested?" "No. He was blown up by a mortar shell in the Guadarrama, leading an attack of partisans. The Germans had him for a time, but we found a way to get him out. A Yugoslavian fascist group, the Ustachi, asked to collect him for interrogation. They are Croatian and Kulic is Serbian and the Germans appreciate such differences, so they released him and we got him back. "How?" "It's our group--this particular band of Ustachi. You know this business, Khristo. One needs a little of everything." "He must be well regarded." "Somebody thinks he might be of use. Otherwise..." "And Voluta?" Ilya paused for a moment. "Probably I shouldn't tell you." "Well, don't if you can't." "No, it doesn't matter. You of course recall that girl, Marike, at Arbat Street. You knew her somewhat, I believe." "Yes." "One day she disappeared. Well, it seems that somebody had hidden a list of the names of the Brotherhood Front of1934in a most ingenious place--scratched on rubber, washed down the sink, but the rubber was just heavy enough to stay caught in the trap. Marike's bad luck was that some fool tried to get rid of a condom in the sink--no doubt the throne was occupied and he was in a hurry--and _that__ stopped it up but good. Next, an unfortunate miracle: a plumber actually appeared one day and unpluggedthe drain. He knew what he had, went and barked his head off in the right places and down came the counterintelligence types. They pinned the thing on Marike, I don't know why, and away she went. Ozunov as well, of course. Later, much later, they found out some other way that it had been Volutaall along. Now, the best part. He was a priest! Part of a Polish nationalist movement called NOV, made up of priests and army officers. Not fascists--though Moscow would certainly call them that. Patriots, I think, in a conspiracy to preserve Poland as a national entity. They are very much on our Watch List, because they are very dedicated and have enjoyed some significant success. Witness Voluta:he penetrated the Arbat Street training facility, noted every personality and physical description in the place and then, when he was assigned to the _rezidentura__ in Antwerp, simply got off the train and has not been seen since. The problem with this NOV is that it spreads among the priests--I mean outside Poland, among other nationalities--and there is reason to believe that the army officers have made similar connections. This is not exactly the Polish government, you understand, but a conspiracy that hides in its shadow. Thus our assets in Warsaw can do nothing about it. Our friend Volutais quite a famous priest in Moscow." "My God," Khristo said, truly amazed that he'd been deceived along with everybody else. "I never thought..." "He was very much in himself, you'll remember." "Yes. And always helpful, willing to do more than his share." "Priestly, eh? And we suspect that this NOV shares information with Poland's dearest ally--British intelligence. Heaven only knows where it might go from there. I expect we are all quite famous by now." "Where do you think he is?" Ilya smiled and spread his hands to include the entire world. They walked for a time, past the tomb of the Rothschilds, the graves of Daumier and Corotand Proust. "Do you know the Mur des F�r�"Ilya asked, standing by the cemetery wall. "No." "The last of the Paris Communards died here, in1871.They fought all night among the gravestones, then surrendered at dawn.The soldiers put them against this wall, shot them, and buried them in a common grave." "Are you a communist, Ilya? In your heart?" "Oh yes. Aren't you?" "No. I just want to live my life, to be left alone." There was a moment's silence, then Ilya said, "Now, a matter of some delicacy." They turned and began to walk again, their steps audible on the gravel path. "What is that?" "This business of the assassination of our courier." "On May Day?" "Yes." "What about it?" "The _rezidentura__ here is frantic---they are under the gun, believe me, Moscow is entirely outraged. They've sent in thugs from everywhere, specialists, and activated every net in Paris. So far, no fish." "Perhaps that was why it was done. To see who showed up, to learn from the activity." Ilya looked at him sharply. "The old Khristo," he said. When there was no response, he went on. "Anyhow, they really _want to know.__ What's come in to date is the usual plateful of crumbs--White Russians, phony princes, Cossack doormen, a Mills grenade with Stalin's name painted on it--but Yezhov's not buying any of that." "And so?" "If you should happen to hear something..." "Then what?" "I believe you mentioned being left alone to live your life?" "Yes." "That's what." Khristo spoke carefully: "I asked you earlier if they were getting close to me. Is this your answer?" Ilya shook his head violently, like a wet dog. "No. Do not misunderstand me. I said they were looking for you. I don't know they are, I assume it. But you had better assume it as well. A favor might turn the pressure off, though nobody can guarantee it--not me, not anybody. On the other hand, what have you got to lose?" They talked for an hour after that, reminisced: Arbat Street, Belov, Spain, Yaschyeritsa, Sascha. Then they parted. Khristo returned to the room. Aleksandra wasn't there. It was Sunday--she'd mentioned something about a picnic in the park. But he had talked to Ilya longer than he'd intended, perhaps she had given up on him and gone to thecinema. That was probably what she'd done, he decided. He waited for her, smoking Gitanes, watching the square of sky in the window turn slowly from blue to dark blue, from hazy lavender at sunset to the color of dusk, and then to night. At first, he expected her to return, and waited. Later, for a time, he hoped for it. The hour for him to go to work passed unnoticed. He paced the room, moving from the batteredarmoirethat served as their closet to the open window. He would pause there and look out, sometimes seeing, sometimes not. The shops were closed, their metal shutters pulled down. A few people hurried along the sidewalk, one or two cars went by. Sunday night, and everyone was locked up in their apartments, hiding from whatever it was they hid from on a Sunday night. He could smell potatoes frying and the damp scents of the Paris street. It was so quiet that sounds of clinking plates and bits of conversation--once a laugh--floated up to him. Then he would turn away from the window, move to the foot of the bed and back across to thearmoire. At one point he opened it, found all her clothing in place, including the white Marlene Dietrich trenchcoat--a fashion necessity that spring in the city--her pride and joy. But it had been warmish in the afternoon, she could have worn only a sweater. In the drawer of the night table she kept a box of small things she believed to be valuable. Bits and pieces. A silver button, an American coin, a cameo of Empress Josephine from a souvenir shop. Her perfume was heavy on the treasures, as though she had once kept the bottle among them. On one of his trips past the small mirror, he discovered a red, angry mark on the skin beside his eye, realized it hurt, realized he had put it there himself. He looked at his hands, knew for a certainty that if he had a gun he would kill himself. She was lost, he knew; he had lost her, he would not see her again. He lay down on the bed, on his side, and drew his knees up to hischest and pressed his fingers hard against the sides of his head to stop the pain behind his eyes, but that didn't work. Later, he woke up with a gasp, dizzy and lost, and felt the weight of sorrow return to him. Discovered the side of his face was wet. He forced himself off the bed and started searching the room, but he missed it on the first search, found nothing out of the ordinary. A ten-franc note hidden in a shoe, that was all. At1:30in the morning he opened the door and listened for a long time at Dodin's room down the hall, heard only silence. He kicked the door open, went over the room slowly and carefully, as he'd been taught, but there was nothing there at all, only dustballs beneath the bed. Nothing in the drawers. Nothing in thearmoire.Nothing taped anywhere out of sight. Nothing. He tried to close the door, but the lock mechanism wouldn't work anymore where he'd sprung it, so he simply left it open. He checked the light fixture in the hall, took his money out, and put it in his pocket. That was all he could do. He went back to his room and watched the night as the hours passed by. Sometimes he swore revenge, quietly, under his breath, a stupefying and obscene anger that meant nothing. At dawn, moving mechanically, he began putting his own things into a pillowcase. When everything he wanted was there and he was ready to go--though he didn't know where--he forced himself to search the room once again. He willed his mind clear and did the job as he knew it should be done: an inch at a time, starting in a corner and expanding outward and upward in imaginary lines of radiation. He got down on his knees, the lamp by his side wherever the cord would reach an outlet. He found it an hour later. There was old wainscoting by the door, poor-quality wood with the varnish flaking off, and as he moved the lamp the shift of angle in the light revealed the marks. He moved his fingers across the wood, confirming what he saw. She had, after all, left him a message. He sat down heavily and cried into his hands for a long time. He didn't want anyone to hear him. Time and again he touched the wall, traced, with agonizing slowness, the faintly marked outlines of the four scratches her fingernails had made as she'd been taken through the door.

The guys out in Clichy absolutely loved it when Barbette came around. They'd run theirpoulesoff and set him up at one of the tables at Le Marocor the Dutchman's place on Rue Truot that everybody called thecul de cochonand let him buy them drinks all night. He was the strangest thing they ever saw out there---where _people__ didn't come unless they had to, and then always in daylight--because he had the money and he liked to spend it and he liked to spend it on them. He was tall for a Frenchman, and he stood straight up and looked at you with those little dark eyes that always seemed to catch the light and he had a big, false laugh. You could tell him you just stole your mother's teeth and he'd laugh. Even his name, Barbette, what did that mean? A nickname? The word meant "little beard" and he had one of those, a devil's beard, from sideburn tight along the jawline sweeping up to join the mustache, so closely pruned he must have nipped it with a scissors every night. But a _barbette__ was also a nun's veil that covered the breast, and that expression in turn was used in slang to mean sleeping on the floor or guns firing in a salvo. The word sometimes referred to a water spaniel--the efficient sort that always brought in the kill. They asked him, in their own way, but all they ever got was that laugh. They didn't really care--he was the kind of guy you liked even better because he wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know. It meant he wasn't in the habit of running his mouth, and that mattered to people out in Clichy. Johnny La Flamme and Poz Vintre and Escaldofrom Lisbon and Sarda, the deaf-mute who watched your mouth when you talked and knew what you were saying. They were all the family any of them had and they looked out for one another in their own way and they could smell a cop three blocks off. Barbette was no cop. But he wasn't one of them, either. He was something different. The girls all said he was crazy, that he went for the _petite__soeurlike a maniac who'd been marooned on an island. Maybe a bit of a showoff, they said, and he really liked that fancy stuff--nothing standing up--that went on all afternoon and left them worn out for their real work at night, down in the Rue St.-Denis near Les Hallesor up in Montmartre. Butthe guys put up with it. Barbette was always good for a touch when you came up short and henever asked for it back. Everybody had to have one of those long coats like they had in _Little Caesar__ or _Public Enemy__--and you couldn't steal those. The great Capone, they fancied, would have told them they looked just right. Then one day he went off with Escaldoand Sardaand when they showed up again they were richer than they'd ever been. Sent away the rotgut the Dutchman dished up under the namevinrougeand ordered the real stuff--for themselves and everybody else. One couldn't ask questions. But the new wealth came from Barbette and it put matters in an entirely new, and very interesting, light. He'd gone from putting money in their bellies--drinks and whatnot--to putting money in their pockets, and that made him really important, no longer just a guy who came around. They were a little jealous of Escaldoand Sarda--why not me?--but they had nothing but time and maybe it was their turn next. Escaldoand Sarda, inthe beginning, didn't say all that much. Sardacouldn't--not without a pencil and paper, and who wanted to bother with that--and Escaldowouldn't. He looked like a pimp, dark and slick and vain, and he kept one of those Portuguese fish-gutting knives strapped to his ankle. You didn't press him too hard, the girls had found that out pretty quick. As for poor Sarda, his face was carved into deep lines from trying all his life just to do things that everybody else took for granted. When he got agitated, he made noises in his throat and privately they all admitted they were a little bit afraid of him. So, for a time, the wine flowed and the beef sizzled and everybody just shut up and waited patiently. But in families everything comes out eventually, and Escaldogot drunk one night and let them in on part of it. He was, also, under some pressure to explain things. Some smart guy figured out that maybe Barbette banged the girls so hard to prove he wasn't a fairy, which meant maybe he was, which meant that Escaldoand Sardahad sunk to a level where it was definitely _out__ of the family. Escaldocouldn't afford to let too much of that go on, so he sang. The money they had now, he explained, was only the beginning. There'd be more--maybe a lot more, maybe the _big one__ they all dreamed of and talked about. Barbette had taken them to anabandoned farmhouse somewhere to hell and gone outside Paris and he'd shown them these, ah, things, and run them through a little schooling and let them, even, use them a few times. _Bon__Dieu! Quellesmachines! Quellesinstruments! His eyes glowed as hetalked, and it only took a few more glasses of marc to get the whole story out in the air. Lesmachines�crire de Chicago. There it was, now they had it all. Chicago typewriters. That's what Barbette had to show them on the broken-down farm outside Paris. Escaldospread his long coat apart and took out two little pimp cigars and lit one for Sardaand one for himself. Did Bottles Capone, Al'sbrother, or Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik have anything they didn't? _Not anymore.__ Machine guns. Around the table, nobody could say anything for a long time, thinking about that. Khristo found a room deep in the Marais, on adark side street off the Rue des Rosiers. It was an ancient building, narrow, seven flights to the top floor, with rusted iron pipes crossing the ceiling and a small window on a courtyard where it was nighttime from dawn to dusk. He rented the room from an old Jew bent in the shape of a _C,__ with black sidelocks, beard, coat, and hat. "Who wants you, little one?" the man asked in Russian. "I don't understand," Khristo answered in French. The man nodded to himself. "Oh, pardon me then," he said in Russian. The thought of Alexandra's things in the treasure box, left to be pawed by the landlady, haunted him, but a return to the room was out of the question. Surely they had him spotted at Heininger as well, but it was less likely that they would snatch him there. He considered finding Yasin again, in the Turkish quarter out on the Boulevard Raspail, and acquiring another weapon, but he put it off. Ilya had given him a telephone number--that was his best weapon now. Had Ilya set him up? Kept him at the cemetery while Aleksandra was taken? Perhaps. Perhaps Ilya had been set up to set him up. At least he knew where he was now. On the NKVD chessboard, all his moves known and predicted, hostileknights and bishops dawdling while he figured out how to move onto the very square where they wanted him. Somehow, it didn't matter. Fate was fate. He would play the game out to checkmate, they would all meet again in hell. Sweating in the late June weather, he stood in a telephone _cabinet__ at the neighborhood post office while the call was put through. They answered on the first ring. He merely said, "I want a meeting." They told him to be at the church of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre at6:30the following morning. For early mass, Ilya was in worker's clothing, a copy of L'Humanit�the communist daily, folded under one arm. Khristo watched him move slowly down the aisle, kneel briefly, then enter the pew. They were virtually alone, the place was empty except for a few shawl-covered women in the front row and a priest who sped through the rite in mumbled Latin. The high ceilings held the church in soft gloom as the first sun touched the tops of the windows. "You are very quick," Ilya said, speaking in an undertone. He glanced at Khristo suspiciously. "Twenty-four hours," he mused. "Have you considered a career in this business?" "I want her back," Khristo said, his voice tight with anger despite an attempt at neutrality. "Do what you like with me, but let her go" "Who?" "She calls herself Aleksandra." "I'm sorry," Ilya said, "I know nothing about this." "You lie," Khristo said. "No. Not true." "I may just cut your throat right here, Ilya. You're close enough to heaven for a speedy trip." "Khristo!" "Blasphemy? You don't like it?" "Stop it. I don't know what you're talking about." 'To hell with you, then." He stood, began to move down the pew toward the aisle. "Khristo, wait, please," Ilya called in a loud whisper. He remained standing, but moved no farther. "They are outside. All over the place. They'll cut you down." "In front of a church? In the street in broad daylight?" "Yes, of course. Just like Myagin." "Good. You'll die first." "You think they care?" Khristo sat down again and shook his head in disbelief. "You feel no shame, Ilya. How do you do it?" "Don't attack me, Khristo. I am trying to help you. Fold up your scales of justice and put them away and don't make judgments. I know nothing of this Aleksandra, but I promise to do whatever I'm able to do. There are so many of us, you see, each one under orders, and it is all compartmentalized, so one doesn't always know--" "Enough! We're here to bargain..." "We are not. There is no bargain." "Then what?" "Give us Myagin's murderer, Khristo." "First the girl." Ilya gestured _no__ and closed his eyes for a moment. "Please," he said gently. "Omaraeff," Khristo said. "Who is he?" "The headwaiter at Brasserie Heininger. A Bulgarian." "For God's sake, why?" "I don't know. Patriotism, perhaps. There is a chance the British are involved." "And you? Are you involved?" "Marginally, Ilya. I did a small favor, then I walked away from it." "You didn't like the plan?" "No, Ilya, no. I had something. For the first time in my life, just living like a plain man. Working at a job. Coming home to a woman. Nothing I did mattered at all. It was a joy, Ilya. Incomprehensibly a joy." �"I am sorry." �"Can you get her out?" "I don't know. You remember how it is--all blind passages. But I swear to you I will try. I have friends, I'm owed favors.�But I must be discreet." "Can I walk out of here?" "No. I must leave first. Then you will be left alone." Hethought about the signal, its simplicity. All Ilya had to do was let him go first, and he would be dead in a few seconds. "God help you, Ilya," he said. "Let me help you first. If this Omaraeff is pressed, will he sing your name?" "A certainty." "Very well. That I can fix." "I don't care." "So you say, but I want you alive. For the other..." "You must," Khristo said, pleading. Ilya nodded, looked at Khristo for a moment, then stood. "Goodbye, my friend," he said and offered his hand. Khristo did not take it. Ilya shrugged, tucked L'Humanit�neath his arm, and walked up the aisle. He saw them as he left the church--some of them. One in a car. Another reading a newspaper in the little park that surrounded the church. A tourist couple--at seven in the morning!--taking pictures of the Seine on the other side of thequai. His picture too, no doubt. As he turned north, a car pulled out of a parking space and trailed him. It was the battered Simca that had appeared one night in early spring as he walked home. He remembered the driver, drunk and grinning as he aimed the car up the middle of the street. They had, he realized, been with him for a long time. How long? Had Vladi Z., his companion in the internment camp, been one of them? If so, they had been _running__ him, an unknowing provocateur, since the day he left Spain. And he had fled from Madrid after a telephone call from none other than Ilya Goldman. Yet Yaschyeritsa's threats had been real enough.'Or maybe not. Had they tried to panic'him that far back? A bullet-headed thug, with pale hair sheared to a bristle, swung out of a doorway and matched his pace. All sorts of specialists, Ilya had said, were now operating in Paris. The city would be crawling with them. He knew that NKVD search brigades, the sort of units that descended on suspicious activity in the villages, could be ten thousand strong. Not that they would try anything like that in France, but they had people in abundance and they used them abundantly. He wanted to go to the bookstore where he had met Aleksandra, and he wanted to go alone, so he lost the cars by taking the M�ofor two stops. That left him with Bullet-head and a fat-faced man in the Moscow version of a business suit. They stayed with him as he wandered around the back of the Fifth--the university quarter--among students hurrying to early class at the variousfacult�f the Sorbonnescattered through the district. He entered one of the classroom buildings and moved through the corridors and up and down the staircases in a tight press of humanity. When he finally left the building, Fat-face was gone. Perhaps he had given the whole thing up, Khristo thought, humiliated by student derision at his colossal suit, and defected to the registrar. Khristo glanced behind him--not even deigning to use the standard shop-window-as-mirror--and saw that Bullet-head was sweating up a storm, the last man left. A passenger got out of a nearby taxi and Khristo waved it down. Then watched through the rear window as the NKVD man ran in frantic circles looking for another. He rode three blocks, paid the driver, and stood back in a doorway as Bullet-head sailed by in his own taxi, terrified, surely, that such an expense would not be approved by his bosses. Later that morning, Khristo stood in the bookstore, browsing among the thick, uncut volumes on surrealism and Marx. On the far wall was a poster, in livid red and black, celebrating the Republican effort in the Spanish war. There were stark crosses above graves and a shadowed face of great determination and strength looking into the near distance. In fiery letters, lines from the poet John Cornford were spread across the paper. Cornford, a poet and Marxist from Cambridge, had died at twenty-one, a machine-gunner in one of the international brigades. "Nothing is certain, noth�is safe," the lines read. "Everything dying keeps a hungry grip on life/Nothing is ever born without screaming and blood." He watched the clerks in their blue smocks, moving about the store. How had Aleksandra fitted into this milieu? Her politics, he knew, were the politics of survival, her own survival. Largerquestions were not germane--theories bored her; passions belonged in bed, not on the speaker's platform. Her absence stabbed him suddenly, and he said her name silently and dropped a book back onto a table. "Captain Markov?" At that name--his cover in Spain--he froze. Turned slowly to the source of the voice and found Faye Berns. His first impression of her was long hair, washed and shining, and jade-colored eyes, lit up with recognition, meeting his own. On second glance, he saw that her face was sallow and exhausted, that life had not been easy. "Did I startle you?" she said. "Yes," he said, "a little." She took his arm as they crossed the street toa caf�The touch, at first, made him feel guilty, as though it desecrated his sorrow, as though it betrayed Aleksandra. But he could not deny its warmth, he could not deny how good it felt. They sat beneath a striped awning and drank cup after cup of coffee. She told him the story of her life those past few months, her eyes shining with unshed tears as she spoke. Andres had died. He had spent a long time dying, as doctor after doctor paraded through a rented apartment near the Parc Monceauthat her father had paid for. Their plan, originally, had been to travel to Greece, where Andres had friends who would take them in. Perhaps they'd get married; at times they talked about it. Somehow, the tickets were never bought, there was always something else that had to be done. Renata Braunhad left Paris in February, promising to write as soon as she was settled. They waited anxiously for a letter as the weeks went by, but it never arrived. Then Andres came down with a fever. At first they ignored it. The Paris damp--one had to grow used to a new climate. But the fever was stubborn. Various doctors were consulted, medicines of all sorts were prescribed, but nothing seemed to work. Slowly, the sickness grew worse, until she had to stay up with him all through the night, sponging the sweat from his body, changing the wet sheets. At times he fell into adelirium, shouting and whining, often in languages unknown to her. He was in Anatolia, he thought, and pleaded with her to hide him from the Turkish soldiers--he heard them coming up the stairs. She would go to the door and look out, reassure him that they had just left. She said anything that came to mind, anything to calm him, because his terror broke her heart. She wept in the bathroom, washed her face, went back to the bed, and held his hands until dawn. In times of clarity, he told her the truth about himself in great detail--where he had been, what he had done. His only regret, he said, was that the one thing in his life he had cared for, the Communist party, had turned on him. She argued with him about it--one could always care for humankind, could work for the oppressed. It had nothing to do with a printed card. But this line enraged him--she did not understand, he claimed--so she dropped it. He became sly and strange. Would hide his medicine spoon among the covers so she couldn't find it and accuse her of telling the concierge his secrets. When she cleaned the apartment in the morning, he would not permit her to leave his sight. On his good days, he spoke of marriage. Passionately. They must have a child, he said, to continue his work. He begged her to bring a priest, a rabbi, whatever she wished. She told him it would be wiser to wait until he felt better and was his old self again. Her hesitancy angered him, and he accused her of infidelity. Then, with the coming of spring, he seemed to grow stronger. She took him on outings to the Parc Monceau, where he would walk with a jacket over his shoulders and lecture her on a range of political matters. He read the newspapers avidly and explained to her the historical implications of every event. Now, instead of hostility and suspicion toward her, he began to plot revenge against certain individuals in the Comintern who he believed had betrayed him. He became obsessed with the Russian poet Ilya Ehrenburg, claimed he was under strict NKVD supervision, and planned to write an article for a Parisian quarterly--the Nouvelle Revue Fran�se--exposing Ehrenburgfor what he was. But then, suddenly, on a day when he'd planned a visit to a museum, on a day when he'd made a telephone call, eaten anomelette, laughed at one of her jokes, he died. She returned from shopping and found him sitting on the couch with an open book in his hand. The tears came when she finished the story, and she was hunting through her purse when a waiter appeared with a clean white handkerchief, handed to her silently. "My God," she said, "I will miss this city." "I am sorry," Khristo said, "for Andres. And for you. For what happened. If my English was better..." "Oh please," she said, "I understand. And I didn't mean to cry in front of you. It's just. . . When I was sixteen, I used to daydream about a lover dying, to make myself feel sad, I think. But then it happened. It actually happened." She looked around for the waiter, in order to return the handkerchief, but he was busy at another table. '"I think he wants that you keep it," Khristo said, searching for a word. "It is his..." "Gift?" "Yes, a gift."��- She nodded that she understood and blew her nose. "Tell me about yourself," she said. He shrugged. "Some bad things, some good." "Andres explained to me about not telling people about yourself, how important that was, so I understand." "Yes," he sighed. He wanted to tell her everything, resisted a desire to go on and on in riddles, telling but not telling, like Sascha."What for you now?" he asked instead. "I am going home," she said. "To America." "Ah. For the best, no?" "I don't know," she said, uncertain. "Maybe. But the tickets are all bought and there's no turning back now. I was in the bookstore looking for something to read on the boat--I really don't want to listen to a bunch of Americans gossiping about their adventures in wicked old Europe." She made a face at the thought. "Anyhow, I go up to Le Havre today on the train, I'm there overnight, board the Normandietomorrow, seven days at sea, then it's New York." "What train do you take?" "Five-twenty from the Gare du Nord."She was silent for a moment, not happy at the prospect of traveling. For a moment it seemed like she might cry again, a shadow crossed her, then, instead, she managed a gloomy smile. "How like Paris this is---to meet an old friend a few hours before going away forever." "Some day you will come back here." "Do you think so?" There was a real ache in her voice when she said it. "I do," he said. "Funny, I don't even know your name. I don't suppose it's actually Captain Markov." "Khristo is my name. Then Stoianev--like your 'Stephens.'" "Khristo," she said. "Yes. I have not heard it said for a long time. I use another name now." Her eyes suddenly lit up and she smiled to herself. "Is funny?" he asked. "No. It's just that my name isn't Faye Berns, not really." "Ah," he said, "you have a cover." "My name is Frances Bernstein," she said. "But that sounded too much like just another girl from Brooklyn, so I changed it to Faye Berns." He waggled a finger at her in mock reproof. "Too much like true name," he said. "Very bad espionage." She fell silent in wonder at all that had happened to her, her eyes sought his and he realized suddenly that he was the last link to a life she'd lived in Madrid and Paris, that saying goodbye to him was saying good-bye to that. "I don't think," she said sadly, "that I can ever tell anybody what happened to me here. I don't think they would believe it. And I know they wouldn't understand it. Most people pretend that exciting things happened to them--I'll have to pretend they didn't. That's what I should do, isn't it?" He nodded in sympathy, it was a trap they shared. "Better that way," he said. They ate lunch together. And he followed her around Paris for most of the afternoon while she worked her way through an extraordinary list of last-minute errands. He kept an eye out, from time to time, for surveillance, but none appeared, and they were going to places where he'd never been before. When all the items on her list were crossed off he helped her load a large, battered trunk into a taxi, then into a compartment on the train. He went down to the platform when the conductor blew his whistle, and she leaned out the top of the open window. "Can I write you a letter sometime?" she asked, her voice rising above the echoing noise of the vast, glass-domed station. He thought for a moment. "I don't know where you could send it," he said. "You may write to me, then. If you like." She produced a fountain pen, shook it, and scratched a name and address on a scrap of paper. He took it from her and put it in his pocket. The conductor sounded two short blasts on his whistle and swung himself on board. There was a loud hiss of decompression and a cloud of steam billowed onto the platform. Khristo reached up with both hands and she took them in her own. They remained like this for a moment, then the train lurched forward and they let go. The twenty-fourth of June was the first warm summer night of1937--the sort of night when everything was possible, when any dream could come true. Dusk was hazy and soft, as always, but the usual evening chill never appeared. Everyone in the city came out of their apartments, music spilled from the open doors ofcaf�and the strollers, excited by the gentle air, made animated conversation and filled the streets with a music of their own. The clouds were low and dense that night, shutting out the stars, and the city felt like a lovely private room where a party would soon begin. When Khristo arrived at the brasserie, it was a madhouse. Papa Heininger, glasses askew, was glued to the telephone as reservations poured in. As he spoke, he made soothing gestures with his unoccupied hand, as though to placate the invisible caller. "I am desolated, but I must tell you that His Excellency's usual table is simply not available at midnight. He may have it at one, or there is tablefourteen--a quite estimable location in my opinion. " He nodded and soothed, nodded and soothed, as the caller spoke. "Yes, I agree. . . Yes, _most__ unusual. . . Just for tonight, of course. . . Please thank His Excellency for his understanding. . . Thank you, good-bye." He hung up and patted his brow with a folded napkin. "Djadja!" he called out to Omaraeff, standing over the reservation book with pencil at the ready, "Count lava will take number fourteen tonight. Move the Germans!" Omaraeff asked where, for they hadn't a spare inch of space in the entire establishment. Papa Heininger waved his napkin in the air. "Must I do the thinking for the entire world? I don't care where you put them. You may seat them in the toilet for all I care. Tell them it is more efficient so." So the night progressed. The florist arrived with sprays of Bourbon roses, fat, decadent-looking things in shades of maroon and lavender. The baker arrived with baskets of loaves. A party of Americans arrived too early, expecting to be fed. They were, despite some shouting in the kitchen, accommodated. The Bealeparty of six came up the marble staircase at10:30--early for them--but the magical night had excited them beyond fashion. Slowly, the sound level grew to a magnificent bedlam--the music of forks and plates, the ring of crystal glasses touched in toast, manic conversation, unbridled laughter, shouted greetings to friends at far tables. The huge mirrors glittered red and gold, the waiters ran to and fro with trays oflangoustinesand bottles of champagne. And everyone was there. Kiko Bettendorf, the racing driver. The Duchess of Trent, accompanied by Harry and Hazel, her deerhounds. Dr. Matthew O'Connor and his "niece, " Miss Robin Vote, charming and melancholy as always in her tuxedo and bow tie. The mysterious Mile. M. --tonight with both her lovers. There was Voyschinkowsky--"The Lion of the Bourse"--with a party of twelve. Fum, the beloved clown of the Circus Dujardin. Ginger Pudakis, Jimmy Grey, Mario Thoeni--the tenor, and Adelstein--the impresario--guests of Winnie and Dicky Beale. The Prince of Bahadur was accompanied by his Austrian nurse, who showed to advantage in a million dollars' worth of the Bahadur royal emeralds. Therewas Kreml, the ammunition king, squiring the immense Frau Kreml, hermother, her sister, her cousin, and that nice woman from the hotel who was teaching them bridge. Count lava. The Baronessde Ropp. Miss Catherine Fetwick-Mill. Mr. Antonio Dzur. Monsieur Escaldo, of Clichy. His silent associate, Monsieur Sarda. And their mentor, the handsomely attired Barbette. Escaldoand Sarda, intheir long gangster coats, fedoras pulled down on their foreheads, Thompson guns held at the hip, caused great stir with their arrival. First of all, they did not have a reservation. Simply swept past Papa Heininger, Mireillethe hat-check girl, and Omaraeff the headwaiter without a word. When they entered the dining room, they provoked an instant burst of excitement. Was life not sufficientlyfantastiqueonthis magical night? No, apparently not. For here were real "American" gangsters, a spicy addition to an evening that had already established itself as thrilling and glamorous. Vive legrand Capone! someone shouted, and glasses rang as other voices joined in the toast. With a cinematic flourish, Escaldoand Sardaraised their weapons and pulled the triggers. Muzzle flashes danced and glittered at the ends of the barrels and the great room dissolved into splinters, a confusion of color and motion, screams and raw panic. Khristo was on the floor before he knew what was happening. A man in a cape jumped to his feet and sprinted for the exit, knocking him backward, first into a table of four, then onto the carpet. He heard the rounds buzzing over his head and burrowed down as the mirrors lining the walls dissolved in silvery showers of glass. These were�>machineguns--in effect, rapid-fire pistols using the same.45-caliber bullet as the American military side-arm--so, even though they were fired into the ceiling and upper walls, whatever they touched virtually exploded, and diners groveling below the volleys were covered with plaster and mirror shards. It was a miracle that nobody was actually killed. Count lava, having secured table fourteen for the evening, found himself pinned to the carpet by its weight, and nearly choked to death on a mouthful of baby lamb. Kiko Bettendorf, survivor of the Death Curve at Frelingheissen Raceway, would require fourteen stitches to repair the gash in his scalp. Frau Kreml, hiding beneath atable cloth and believing herself the object of a robbery, dislocated two fingers in a fruitless attempt to remove her rings. Ginger Pudakis stood up, a foolish thing to do, and had her forehead creased by a spent round that ricocheted from the ceiling. She then fell backward against a chair, blood trickling down her face. From where he lay, Khristo saw what happened next, though he was not able to think about it until later. Of all the people in the room, amid the shrieking and the gunfire, it was Winnie Bealewho acted with courage. Seeing her friend hit, she leaped forward, from a position of relative safety on a banquette, and covered her friend's body with her own. Barbette had disappeared, having elected to wander in search of Omaraeff, who had vanished from his usual position at the front of the room. Since he was the true object of this operation, Barbette was anxious to find him. He had not left the restaurant--Barbette had made sure of that. Nor was he in the Men's Room. He was, however, in the Ladies'. In the last stall where he'd gone to hide, his legs bare, a red waiter's jacket gathered around his ankles in imitation of a skirt. Barbette stood at the entry to the stall, the door held open by his left hand, a gmm device of no particular distinction held loosely at his side, and contemplated the seated Omaraeff, who was bent well forward, his face hidden in his hands. Barbette's mouth twisted in sorrowful irony. "Oh Djadja," he said, not unkindly, "women do not take their skirts down to use the toilet, they pull them up. Is that possibly something you would not know? Yes? No? Or is it just the strain of the moment that's confused you? Yes? Tell me, my friend, you must say something." Omaraeff just shook his head, refused to uncover his face. "Poor Djadja," Barbette said. From where he stood, the top of Omaraeff's shaven skull offered a particularly tempting aspect and, without further discussion, he raised his hand and completed his mission. Omaraeff rocked back, then collapsed forward, still seated, his upturned hands resting motionless on the tile floor. It was a small facility, the ladies' W. C. at the Brasserie Heininger, with marble walls and ceiling, and Barbette's ears rang for hours thereafter. Roddy Fitzware's favorite place in Paris was the center window table at the Tour d'Argent. He loved the view of the Seine, best appreciated from the sixth-floor restaurant, well above the heads of the tourists. He loved the serious atmosphere--one came here to dine beautifully, period--which stimulated a deep, formal serenity in him, made him, he felt, his best self. Here he could do without the absurd eye makeup and stylish effeminacy that cloaked his persona in thecaf�ciety in which, by direction, he'd taken up residence. He loved thecaneton, and he loved theturbot. When it came time to spend some of His Majesty's Secret Impres't Funds, the Tour d'Argentwas where he liked to go. One had to scribble the odd voucher, of course, so he couldn't just simply dine. He had to do His Majesty's business. His Majesty's business arrived on the stroke of1:15.Fabien Th�d, astiff-necked young Frenchman, surely somebody's nephew, who moved in the upper circles of the DST--the French equivalent of MI5. In other words, a cop. But, Fitzware thought, a cop in a very good suit. He watched him march resolutely toward the table, chin raised, nostrils pinched, mouth slightly drawn down, as though the world disgusted him. Fitzware stood, they shook hands formally, in the French manner--a single, firm pump--and Th�dseated himself with ceremony. To the left of the elaborate luncheon setting on Th�d'sside of the table lay a brown paper parcel neatly tied with string. The Frenchman politely ignored the package. He had been treated to these lunches for more than a year and had learned to accept Fitzware's sense of theater. Revelations were not to be made in the first act. Once ritual courtesies were done with and after the service of the wine, Fitzware came to the point. "Your people," he said, "must be in a frightful uproar this morning." "Oh?"Th�dseemed legitimately surprised. "Last night's madness--the little war at Heininger." "Hardly a war. No one shot back and only the headwaiter was killed. In any case, nothing very interesting for us."Th�dwaved it away. "Really?" "Lesgangsters. Some sort of stupid criminal nonsense. Perhaps an extortion, perhaps a war between butchers for the beef concession, one can only imagine the truth of it. Thepr�cturealready has the two machine-gunners. Trash. Low-grade pimps from Clichy. As for the headwaiter, shot in the toilet, I think that was what the Americans call a _rub-out.__" "Nothing much for you, then." "No. The police and the justice ministry will see to it." "Some prominent people injured, one reads." Th�dindulged himself in a mighty Gallic shrug accompanied by an explosive _"Pack!"__ Then smiled grimly. "The American socialite? The German racing driver? _These people.__ They come to Paris to be decadent, by accident they come upon the real thing, and then they howl. Good stuff for the newspapers is all it is. As for Heininger's, I wouldn't try to go there for a week or two if I were you." "They will close down, then?" "Close! Heavens no. You won't be able to get in the door." Fitzware smiled ruefully. "In any case, your efficiency is admirable, to have the assassins so quickly." Th�dbrightened visibly at being complimented for efficiency. "Nothing to it, mon vieux. In the British phrase, 'information received.' The criminals were sold out almost immediately. They won't talk, of course--that would be to violate the code of the underworld. So what they'll get is a nice quick little trial and, if they don't give us the murderer of the headwaiter, the services of Dr. Guillotin. Truly, I don't believe they'll mind all that much. There is some honor to it in their society." "In some countries they would be considered merely accessories." "Perhaps. But this is France, and here they are murderers." For a time they turned their attention to the food and the wine, then Fitzware asked, "May I ask the state of your progress in the matter of the Russian courier?" "Ach, you'll ruin my lunch. A nest of snakes is what that is. Informants and counterinformants, power struggles in the�gr�mmunity, lies and wishful thinking and false confessions and rumors and every sort of unimaginable nonsense. I fear that one may be forever lost to us." "You have found it," Fitzware said simply. Th�dlooked at him suspiciously. "Yes? I cannot believe my luck would be that good." "But it is. Just to the left of your _plat__de salade." "This package?" "Indeed. It is a Radom." "Oh. A Radom. And that is...?" "An automatic pistol of Polish manufacture, a very serviceable weapon, greatly prized east of the Oder. You'll find that it killed Myagin and, by accident, Ivan Donchev, the old man in the movie theater." Th�draised a hand and halted him right there. Called for the wine waiter and ordered the best Montrachet they could bring up. "Thus," he said dramatically, "to those who serve France." Fitzware inclined his head in a seated bow. He was clearly enjoying himself. "There's a bit more," he said. "The gun was obtained from a Turk, called Yasin, in the quarter out by Boulevard Raspail. The man who bought it is called Nikko Petrov, a Bulgarian, presently employed as a waiter at the Brasserie Heininger. There. Now I feel I have served France." Th�d's facecollapsed. "Oh no," he said, "you must not do this to me." Fitzware was stunned. "You are telling me--if I were not deaf as a post and entirely unable to hear you--that some connection exists between the Myagin murder and last night's frolic at the brasserie. Tit for tat. A plot in the restaurant results in the murder of a Soviet diplomat, thus the NKVD returns the favor by shooting the head-waiter and causing general consternation in the brasserie. They would assume, of course, that Heininger would not survive such an incident, being insensitive, for the moment, tocaf�ciety's appetite for scandal. If that is, indeed, what you are telling me, I do not hear it. You did not say it." "In God's name why?" "Politiques. Four days ago, as I am sure you are aware, Camille Chautemps, a radical socialist, succeeded L� Blum, a plain old un-radical socialist, as the premier of France. This is, therefore, no time to anger our most formidable ally, the USSR, by accusing them of upsetting a bunch of rich foreigners in a restaurant. Not with Chancellor Hitler sharpening his teeth on our doorstep, it isn't. My dear Fitzware, I think I am going to weep. With frustration. Right in front of God in the Tour d'Argent. You have solvedour most pressing case and taken it away from us in the same breath." Fitzware bit the end of his thumb and thought for a time. "Well, then, may I suggest you don't solve it? You may come part of the way, surely. Pick up this Petrov character, drop a curtain around him--matters of national security, trial _in camera__--and let it stand there. The Heininger connection need not come up, as long as you keep him well away from the newspapers. And, in the case of the brasserie, at least you know what happened. That might mean something or other later on." Th�ddrummed his fingers on the table. "Perhaps. It becomes complicated, one has to find a way through, but it's possible. There are those in the Ministry of Justice who would unravel the whole _affaire,__ and they will have to be deceived. But it would not be the first time, and we could at least clear the internal accounting. One might ask, however, what this Petrov is to you, that such a fine lunch is served on the occasion of his, ah, delivery." "Well, there one has to proceed by indirection--too much information will only confuse the issue. Let us say we are always anxious to be in your good books, and we know that he damaged one of our operations. For his own purposes, he traded one of our people. to the Russians for someone he wanted back. Our operative had been of significant value, helping us to acquire information about the NKVD in Paris and elsewhere, a surprising amount of information. This Petrov found a way to ruin him, shall we say. You're not going to feed _him__ to Dr. Guillotin, are you?" "We might. If the Russians found out he was involved in the Myagin business we'd almost have to. But, on the other hand, execution always turns out to be a noisy business--the official sort of execution, at any rate. Still, if there's a way..." Fitzware thought for a moment. "Oh well, serve him right if you did." The Montrachet arrived. The cranes fly like summer nights, their shadows on the sun. No, not quite. The cranes fly like summer girls, here but an instant, then... No. One saw girls in the sky. Ridiculous. The cranes fly, like cranes. No. Now his mind was tormenting itself. The cranes fly like. . . How, in fact, _did__ the fucking cranes fly? That was his problem. He'd never seen a crane or, if he had seen one, he didn't know it was a crane. _Someone__ had surely seen the cranes flying, for the accursed image had worked its way into the Russian mythos and stuck there like a dagger. He leaned back in the hard wooden chair and sighed, looking out through the wire at a flat field of weedy grass. Above the guard towers, the sky seemed to stretch to the end of the world. Sascha Vonetswas not meant to be a poet, that's all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion. He put the mutilated poem in a desk drawer and went back to his account ledger. The question was: what should the numbers say? This was harder, even, than cranes. One lived or died with this. So one had _better get it right.__ Problem was, what did Brasovy want? To lie, the better part of the time, to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear just as he told Brasovy what he wanted to hear. Yet there had to be variation, otherwise the whole enterprise was simply too obvious, even for those straw-headed statues back in the Central Administration Office. Some days, one had to tell the truth so that, most days, one could tell the necessary lies. The analysis was correct, all right, but which day was today? The production norms for the Utiny gold fields, in the Kolyma River region midway between the East Siberian Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, were in no way possible to fulfill. In winter, the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero and the wind blew like a demon's rage. The workers lived on translucent soup and a few ounces of gritty bread and died like flies. The work suckedtheir first strength out of them in a matter of weeks. After that, they began dying--not too fast, not too slow--and their ability to shift rock and sand declined rapidly. The previous spring they'd eaten a dead horse. The horse had been dead for a while, when they found it, and they ate the maggots as well. Others had received a barrel of axle grease for their wheelbarrows, and they'd eaten that down to the wood. Some ate Iceland moss, just to put something in their bellies. When they failed to meet the scheduled production norms, dictated by Moscow, they were stripped and watered down and left to freeze in the cold--though not quite to death. In summer they were tied naked to a pole so that the mosquito swarms could eat on them for hours. But what drove them crazy, they said, was the sound of it. The falsetto whirr in the ears. He had learned, somehow, not to know of such things. He had built a wall and lived behind it. He had survived. It was his grandmother who'd kept him out of the execution cellars in the Lubianka. There went the jewelry, the candlesticks, the silver, everything she had put by to survive in bad times. They had sent him east--to the northeast corner of hell, to be precise--with a thirty-year sentence. But he was alive. And he had a debt to pay, a debt to _them,__ and by God's grace he would stay alive long enough to pay it. To make them cry out in anguish, as they had made others cry out. To make them burn, as they had made others burn. To cut their hamstrings, as they had cut millions, and watch them come tumbling down. The crudest thing he had to admit to himself was that, in some strange way, he had never been happier. Suddenly, in this necropolis of ice and flatness and dead gray light, he had a reason to live, for the first time in his life. At last, there was something he wanted. He wanted to hurt them as they had hurt him. How simple and childlike life turned out to be once it was pared down to the basic elements. And the funniest part of it--if anything could ever be funny again--was that they had been right! There they were, killing left and right on pretext. On the phantom basis of a hostile glance, an indiscreet word, a beard drawn on a poster, anything, and, the greedy swine, leaving _him__ alive. The one who had truly spied on them and, b�eryet, continued to do so. Drunken old crazy poet Saschawandering about in a daze with his absurd heart dragging behind him on a chain, this posturing fool, this _poseur,__ was digging up their buried secrets every chance he got. First he had done it in Moscow, long before he'd gone to Spain, in Dzerzhinsky Square itself. Little nighttime trips to the files. What's old what's-his-face doing lately? This? Hmm. That? My, my. The other thing? Dear me. We'll just write that down, in a private little code of our own, and make it into a word, and remember that word. And one could remember, once they were set into meter and rhyme, a thousand words. When he had first arrived at the camp, they had assigned him the job of general laborer. He was supposed to shift seven cubic yards of gravel a day. Wet gravel. He spit on his hands and set to it; it meant survival, a man was capable of anything when pressed. He shoveled till his muscles rang, till his heart squeezed like a fist. Worked as the mucus ran from his nose and his breath rasped and whistled. The trustee came around just before they were marched back to the camp. Vonets, he wrote,503775,two yards. No! Yes. Truth was, perhaps a little over three, but one's production had to be _shared,__ with "others"--he'd get used to it, they had a system. What was he worried about? At that rate, he wasn't going to last anyhow. He had managed to become a trustee before death got him, but it had been a close thing. One by one, he'd worked his way through the camp NKVD, looking for the right one, the one in whom a spark of ambition still glowed. And, at last, found him./am, he'd said, _a writer of reports.__ The old trick had worked again, just as it had back in Moscow. He couldn't fly a damned crane to save his soul but when they needed drivel, and they _needed__ drivel, he was their boy. Fair-haired. Transportational facilities on the above date were diminished by the reduction of one unit necessitating a restructuring of production goalsmsaid date. Which meant the horse had died. They made him a clerk. That meant he lived in a room with four beds and a stove, that meant he worked in an office where they stoked logs into the stove as though tomorrow would never come, that meant he got a fishhead in his soup every night and twelve extra ounces of bread a day, which meant he could stay alive, and, in turn, _that__ meant he could plunge the knife into their hearts and twist with all his might. In time. It meant, most important, that he had something to trade, because the little diary he had kept for so long had to grow, had to stay current, or it would be worth nothing. In the Kolyma it was as though time had stopped. The wind moaned in the fir trees and the world was white. Blank. Yet, somewhere, life went on, operations continued, changed, assumed new shapes, involved new people. All the little details kept piling up and he had to have them, he fed on them, and they kept him on fire and alive. So. He watched the new arrivals. The chekists were easy to spot, in their leather coats and boots and their smug, well-fed faces. They'd been interrogated, all right, but they'd put that nightmare behind them in the transit camps, on the cattle cars, and they came into the camp expecting to be treated, well, at least decently. They were, after all, party members. Then it was the gravel. Or pulling a sledge piled with rocks by means of ropes around their shoulders, like beasts. And that's when Saschawould come around. Could they, perhaps, use a bit of help? A friendly hand? They could? Well, he'd see what he could do. They should hang on, meanwhile, drive that shovel into the wet gravel, take the weight on their forearms, grunt with the effort of it a thousand times a day. He was working on it. The old man responsible for counting the shoes was fading fast, on his last legs--how would they feel about doing such a job? Not too demeaning, counting shoes? He watched their eyes warm with anticipation, their tongues hang out like dogs'. _Soon, soon,__ he would tell them. Just get up at four tomorrow morning in the icy blackness and slurp up a few ounces of soup and have at it one more day. And by the way, stop at my room sometime for a little chat. He didn't really have to ask them. So grateful were they for even the chance to hope that they spewed it all out--if for no other reason than to make themselves of sufficient importance in his eyes to be allowed to count the shoes. _Oh yes, I was the one__who got hold of Bakir, in�stanimi, the minister of armaments. Greedy bastard. Had his hand out all the time until I told him how things were. He's still ours, of that I'm sure. I'm the one who nailed him down. One more new memory word. Entered, in case his mind should fail him, in an account book nobody ever looked at. As the monthswent by, the facts piled up. _Well, Hitler really listens to his astrologer, you know, and I'm the one who went and found Borov, our own astrologer, who tells us every day what Hitler is being told.__ The collection grew and grew. It would make quite a thick book when he finally got around to writing it all out. Perhaps he would make it into a poem, he thought, a patriotic poem or, even better, a patriotic poem dedicated to the NKVD itself. There it was. With each word keyed to the names and places that should have remained forever secret. But it wasn't time for that yet. He would content himself with research until a certain opportunity presented itself. Then, when the moment came, he was going out. His NKVD encyclopedia would buy him out. And then, whoever got the lists--the names, the places, the money, the deeds--whichever intelligence service that turned out to be, they would be the sword. His sword. And he would sit back and watch them cut. On the twenty-third of July, at3:25in the morning, Khristo Stoia-nev was arrested by personnel of the Directionde la Surveillancedu Territoire--the DST. The apprehension was smoothly accomplished. As he headed toward the Marais onfoot, going home from work, he was stopped at the foot of the Pont de Sully. Two well-dressed men came from nowhere, flowed to either side of him and took him gently by the upper arms. He did not resist. At the other end of the bridge he could see two men leaning against either side of the parapet wall. Some distance away, up and down the Quai de la Tournelle,were two idling Citroens.As he was led to a third automobile, one of the detectives informedhim that he was under detention for violation of Subsections104, 316, 317,and318of Article 9B of the Criminal Code of1894,revised, Part XII. He had no idea what all that meant. Later on, a ferret-eyed man who claimed to be hisavocat, defense counsel, explained the charges as having to do with procurement of a weapon in aid and abetment of a felonious homicide. There were other accusations, which theavocatreferred to as "nieces and nephews." Going to procure the weapon, paying for it, and failing to report the transaction to the provincial office of taxes and registrations. The DST Citroen did not turn across the Seine toward the Palaisde Justice but stayed on the Rive Gauche, headed, he speculated, for the�ole Militairedistrict. The detectives ignored him; they spoke quietly among themselves about the new rules regarding compensation received for working on holidays and Sundays. They were preceded and followed by other cars, and they drove cautiously along the empty boulevards. Khristo used his last twenty minutes of freedom to watch the nighttime city slide past the car window. The air was warmish and still, and the summer heat made the aroma of the streets sharpedged and uncomfortably sweet. It was the hour--appropriate for arrest, he thought--when the city cleaned itself. Large trucks hauled away the garbage, the market squares were hosed down, and old women scraped at the cobblestones with brooms made of twigs. He said good-bye, in his mind, to Aleksandra. Since the night of the brasserie shooting he had telephoned the contact number for Ilya many times, but the call was never answered. It was not disconnected, it simply rang, in some empty place somewhere--he imagined an anonymous trading company--and there was no one present to pick up the receiver. But he was wrong about this, for he had tried the number(just once more)in early July and reached a busy signal. He knew, intuitively, what that meant. There was somebody by the phone, somebody under orders not to answer it. He imagined the Russian clerk, love-struck in Paris, chancing one little telephone call to a special friend. He had also gone back to the Matrimonialsin the newspaper, phrasing the BF825signal in a number of ingenious ways, but the only responsehad been letters from lonely women who wanted to be married. He had also watched the newspapers for discoveries of the unidentifiable bodies of young women. There turned out to be a lot of those, poor souls dragged from the river. Times were hard, people got tired of their lives. He was tired of his own. His stomach twisted in knots over what lay ahead of him in a French prison, but somehow he could not bring himself to feel "trapped" or "captured." He was already in prison--a prison of borders, passports, false names, anddefacto nonexistence--a citizen of nowhere. He remembered the train ride back to Moscow from Belov, the dark realization of a homeless, wandering future. So it had been written, so it had turned out to be. Cruel of the fates, he thought, to let me taste this place, to know it, and then to take it away. They moved slowly past the grand buildings of the�ole Militaireand drew up to a gate with a boredgardienslouching against a sentry box. As they rolled to a stop, Khristo saw a green Morgan parked across the street, the driver's face obscured by shadow. A chain was removed, the detective maneuvered the car past concrete bollards and parked in a courtyard with shrubs and flowers around three sides. In the building above him, almost all the windows were dark. He got out of the car and asked if he could smoke a cigarette before going inside and they allowed him to do that, lighting up with him and smoking in silence. When he could see the first edge of dawn, a fading darkness in the eastern sky, he put the cigarette out and took a last breath of free air before they led him across the gravel courtyard into the building. In the fall of1937,in Cell28of the 16th Division, at the Sant�ison, Prisoner16-28received two letters. The first was signed by his "Aunt Iliane"--Ilya, clearly enough--who informed him that she was healthy, in general, though suffering the usual complaints of age. The farm was running well enough. Rain had split the tomatoes, but what could you do about the weather? They had been shorthanded throughout the grape harvest, since his cousin Alexandrehad left. She hadpersonally taken Alexandreto the station, Iliane reported, her health seemed fairly good--considering all she'd been through--and she was now traveling abroad. Of course, nothing had been mentioned to cousin Alexandreabout his present circumstances--Aunt Iliane knew she would find that painful. As for him, she hoped he had seen the error of his ways, and she prayed daily that he would be spiritually reborn. Her arthritis made writing painful--he should not expect another letter anytime soon. She closed by imploring him to have courage. At first, she said, the family had been very angry with him. Now, when they saw what had become of him, while they did not exactly forgive him, they felt that justice had been served. The second letter was from Faye Berns, inresponse to a letter he had sent her. She was heartsick that he was in prison--could anything be done? Could he receive money, or clothing, or books? He must write and tell her. As for her, in some ways it was wonderful to be back in America. In others, not so wonderful. She felt dislocated, a little at sea. Her house looking out over Prospect Park seemed to have shrunk, her parents had gotten old. They had three Jewish refugees from Germany staying with them. A chemist from Berlin and his wife, who suffered from a nervous condition brought on by experiences with Nazi police officials. She paced the living room all night long, but what could anybody say to her? And an architect from Dresden who had been awarded the Iron Cross in the Great War. Even so, the Nazis had closed up his office. All the German Jews were in a very difficult situation--only the lucky and clever ones could leave the country now. A most curious thing had occurred when the three refugees docked at Ellis Island for immigration processing. A well-dressed man had appeared and offered to buy their clothing. All of it--even the underwear and socks. Not only had he paid them, he had given them excellent American clothing in exchange. After that experience, who could convince them that they were not in the promised land? Her own news was that she was engaged to be married. His name was Leon, he was from Brooklyn, and he was finishing up law school at New York University. He was a very good and decent fellow who would take excellent care of her--really, he gave into her a little too much. Her father more than approved of the match, since Leon shared his political views and, well, a lawyer. Even the owner of Bernstein's, the second largest department store in Flatbush, thought the seas would part for him. On consideration, they probably would, Leon was just that kind of person. She had not yet told him of her "other life." Perhaps she wouldn't, she wasn't sure he would understand it. He was very anxious to have children, once his practice was established. Children? Well, that would be another adventure, certainly. She had seen a few of her friends from Pembroke, and most of them already had their first child. She closed the letter by saying she hoped he would write again. Their day together had been very important to her. She thought of him often. He read the letter many times and spent a long time considering his reply. Finally, he chose not to write back. What would be the point? In July, after three days in a detention cell, he had been taken to a small room and "tried." The judge had apparently come in from a country house and was wearing white shoes, as for a garden party, beneath his robes. Over a fifteen-minute period, several documents had been read aloud in rapid, legal French. Then the judge sentenced him to spend the rest of his natural life in Sant�ison. Prisoner16-28was, in the French custom, isolated in his cell. This was believed to encourage penitence, which was, after all, the intent of a penitentiary. Cell28was six feet long and four feet wide. A bed folded up against the wall in the daytime and there was a chair, chained to a ring in the wall. There was a toilet, and a water spigot for washing. The cell was painted brown halfway up the wall, then yellow to the ceiling. In the door was a Judas port that served two purposes: surveillance once an hour and food three times a day, almost always mashed lentils and black bread. Drinking water was poured into his "quarter," a tin cup that held a quarter of a liter, at mealtimes. Twice a week, for one hour, he was taken into a courtyard and allowed to walk the perimeter and converse with other prisoners. For the rest of his time he remained alone in his cell, allowed one book a week. These were usually boys' adventure stories with morally improving points of view or, sometimes, religious tracts. Behind a fine mesh grille was a window made of thick, opaque green glass that bathed the cell in a milky light yellowed by the colors on the walls. In one corner of the window, however, was a hole about the size of a one-franc piece, with a fine web of fracture lines about it--something had been poked through the wire mesh by a former occupant. Khristo was thankful to the man, whoever he had been, because it meant he could see a tiny piece of the sky over Paris. At dawn, when the bell woke him up, it was the first thing his eyes sought and, again and again, in the course of the endless days, he spent hours staring at it. Sometimes it was a pale and washed-out blue, after a rainfall, perhaps. Other times it was a vivid blue, which meant cool, sunny weather. Sometimes it was gray. Sometimes, the best of all times, a part of a white cloud could be seen.