Night Soldiers

503775

Admitted:20December1936

Labor Classification: Clerk

Present Function: Office of Task Assignment Security Notation: Reliable Charge: Articles40, 42,42A,45and70of the Judicial Code Release Date:20December1966 There was no name on the file, no age, nothing of 503775's life before admission to the camp system. Such information was classified and held elsewhere, no doubt in the files of the resident NKVD officer. But Ilya could tell by a glance down the page that this had, at one time, been _somebody,__ somebody snaffled up in the purges of1936,too important or favored to kill, thus consigned to the Utiny, a nonperson. The man was a trustee, with a good deal of power--clerk's power, but power nonetheless--so had apparently contrived to ingratiate himself with the camp administration. When he entered the room, Ilya felt a slight prickle of recognition. To look at, he was no different from the others--hesitant, nervous, with humility suggested in every motion. He dragged a foot as he walked--a soft scrape on the floorboards--his head was shaven against the lice, camp rations had shrunken his features, and his eyes were slitted from years of the Kolyma weather, sun glaring off the ice fields. His shoulders were stooped, his beard long and lank--a man perhaps in his late fifties, though one could never be sure about age in a camp. Ilya nodded him to the chair; he sat down, then launched himself into a speech of such patriotic frenzy that it became clear to Ilya why the commandant had placed him last on the day's schedule--a theatrical flourish to send the inspector general's little man off happy to his next camp. The phrases flowed like oil. "Let it be remembered" and "hour of the nation's need" and "strayed from the true course" and "dedicated more than ever to sacrifice." All that year's favorites--the man was something of a poet, working in the genre of politicalclich� My God, Ilya thought, _I'm talking__ to Sascha Vonets. He lurched forward, face lit by recognition. Opened his mouth to speak. Sascha's hand shot across the table and Ilya felt a rough finger pressed briefly against his lips in a plea for silence. Ilya was caught with admiration. Saschadidn't miss a beat--"inspired by the Great Leader"--as he pointed back and forth to the far wall and his right ear. Ilya nodded his complicity. The camp commandant was evidently making sure that nobody said _the wrong thing.__ The interrogation room had been cleverly constructed within a maze of administrative offices, essentially three partitions built against an exterior wall. It was windowless, as all interrogation facilities were supposed to be; one wanted to avoid even the implicit suggestion that the prisoner had any way out of the difficulties in which he found himself. The camp commandant, Ilya realized, would likely have some flunky sitting next to one of the walls and taking verbatim notes in shorthand. Sascha, having wound up his introductory remarks, now began the recitation of a poem entitled "Red Banners," a reference to the NKVD medal of honor that could never be worn in public. This poem was, apparently, a personal contribution to the war effort. From the first stanza it became clear to Ilya that it was to be a kind of modern epic, an inspirational hymn of praise to the security services: Arise! ? patriots of the shadows-- who do not see the flight of cranes, whose red banners fly in darkness only-- we salute you! It went on for quite some time, stern images of struggle and heroism marching forward in a grand parade. Then, as he ended the recitation, Saschacame around the table and thrust two slips of paper into the front of Ilya's uniform jacket. When he moved away and sat down again, Ilya slowly exhaled the breath he'd been holding. Up close, the smell of mildew and stale sweat had nearly gagged him. "Might one ask, comrade Captain, your opinion of my humble poem?" "Laudable," Ilya said. "I will certainly inform the appropriate agencies of the existence of this work, you may depend on it." "Thank you, comrade Major." "Thank _you,__503775.You are dismissed." Saschastood. For one instant his eyes were naked, and Ilya saw the truth of the eight years he had spent in the camps. Then the man drew back inside himself, his eyes dulled, and he became again a clerk in a Kolyma gold-mining facility. Ilya found himself wanting desperately to reassure him, to offer at least a gesture of human fellowship, and so patted the place where the slips of paper rested over his heart. Saschaclosed his eyes in a silent gesture of gratitude and bowed his head, then turned and left the room, his dragged leg scraping softly over the floorboards. Before Ilya could be alone to read the letters, there was a great deal to be gotten through: a formal meeting with the camp NKVD officer, followed by a painfully formal exchange of "confidences" with the camp commandant's principal assistant, during which Ilya made sure to communicate his great satisfaction with all he'd found. Followed in turn by an endless, vodka-sodden dinner given in his honor by the commandant and attended by senior staff and their wives. He was seated next to a fat, red-faced woman with merry eyes, stuffed into a gown from the1920s,who resteda hand on his thigh beneath the table and leaned against his shoulder. "You are eating breast of wolf," she giggled in his ear, "is it not delectable?" At long last, late at night, he was returned to the two-car train that sat chuffing idly on the rail spur that serviced Camp782and took its gold away. He entered his private compartment--in an old boxcar that rode high over its cast-iron wheels--and told his adjutant he did not wish to be disturbed, then turned up the flame on an oil lamp that lit the rough wooden interior of the car. He felt the first shudder of motion a few minutes later when, as the couplings clanged, the train slowly began to make way. Outside, the endless snowfields shone white and empty in the darkness, and the slow, steam-driven rhythm of the engine sharpened the sense of being lost in vastness. The first letter was scrawled--apparently written in great haste: Ilya Goldman: I observed you entering the camp this morning and realized that we have known one another. If I have not been able to approach you, I will identify myself as Colonel A. Y. Vonets--Sascha.We met briefly while serving in Spain in1936. In March of1943,a man named Semmers came to this camp, sentenced under Article38(Anti-Soviet Statement). He told me of a conspiracy known as BF825that existed among the Brotherhood Front of1934in the training facility on Arbat Street. He claimed to have been approached by Drazen Kulic, and that others were.involved, including Josef Voluta, Khristo Stoianev and yourself. Semmers attempted to escape in March of this year, was discovered, and shot. I will inform no one of your complicity in this conspiracy as long as you undertake two actions on my behalf: ( 1)The accompanying letter is for Josef Voluta,I believe that you are able to transmit it to him.(2)Within the next sixty days, I must be transferred to Camp209,in Belgorod-Dnestrovskij at the mouth of the Dniester on the Black Sea. I know you have the ability to do this within the labor camp administration. If you choose not to do it, or to reveal these communications, I will inform local NKVD of the existence of BF825,and your participation within it. Forgive me, Ilya. I will not live out another year in this place. The second letter did not have a heading and was printed in tiny letters crammed together on a small slip of brown paper: On12April I will be in the Romanian village at Sfintu Gheorghe, on the southern arm of the Dun�a,where it empties into the Black Sea. I have extraordinarily valuable information for Western intelligence services. The information is recorded in a document I will carry, but it is usable only with my personal assistance. For example, the agent known as ANDRES (Avram Roubenis) was murdered in Paris in19,37with a slow-acting poison clandestinely administered ina caf� the direction of Col. V. I. Kolodny, of the Paris _rezidentura.__ The above is one item among many hundred.I will remain in Sfintu Gheorghe from April12on--until I am discovered or betrayed. I will then confess to the BF825plot and all else I know. Signed: An NKVD Colonel. Ilya sat back and stared at his reflection in the dark window. He saw a taut, colorless face above the green NKVD uniform. By inference, he pieced together what he took to be Sascha's intentions. The mouth of the Dniester was less than a hundred miles from the Romanian delta of the Dun�a--the Danube. Since the surrender, converted ore steamers moved constantly back and forth between the two areas, sailing empty into Romania, returning with wheat, vegetables, horses, and God knew what else. Saschaintended to escape from the camp, then he meant to stow away on a Black Sea steamer that left from Odessa and called at Belgorod, where a chemical works was being built by Gulag labor. He would hide aboard the ship at Belgorod, then disembark secretly at lzmail, the Soviet port on the Danube, after which he would make his way to Sfintu Gheorghe--nominally in the nation of Romania, but in fact a part of the ancient region known as Bessarabia, a remote corner of the world, so lost as to be nearly unknown. If the letter were delivered to Voluta,he would use the NOV apparatus to move the letter to a Western intelligence service, and Saschabelieved he would be exfiltrated from the little fishing village of Sfintu Gheorghe. The letter had to go to Volutabecause Sascha wasaware that Volutaknew him personally and that he, as well as other members of the BF825conspiracy, were in a position to confirm his value to the Western services. It was, in its own way, a reasonably clever plan. Escape from a camp in the Kolyma was nearly impossible--the land itself was a prison. And no Allied intelligence service would want to attempt this sort of covert action in the country of a nominal ally, thus Saschahad placed responsibility on himself for leaving Russiansoil. Romania, on the other hand, was in a condition of political flux that might facilitate an operation to remove a desirable asset. But, Ilya realized, years of training and practical experience said no. The scheme had virtually no chance of success: too many steps, too many assumptions, a blind thrust from a doomed man. In effect, it sentenced Saschato death and, once he escaped from Belgorod and someone checked on how he came to be transferred there in the first place, sentenced Ilya Goldman to death as well. Unless by April is, Ilya thought, listening to the slow beat ofthe wheels,/am somewhere else. But if the exfiltration scheme was wishful thinking, the part of the plot that touched _him__ was close to perfect. Considered objectively, Sascha Vonetshad built a fine trap. In it, Ilya realized, he could move in only one direction; there were no exits along the way and, at the end, it sent him where he wanted to go. The white face in the window smiled ruefully. Truly, you couldn't ask for a better trap than that.

Christmas, _Rozhdyestvo,__ was no longer a holy day in the Soviet Union, yet somehow, on the night of December24,the duty roster at the Fourth Division of the Sixth Directorate was seriously depleted. The inspector general's central bureau in Moscow was on Ulyanovskaya Street, in a turn-of-the-century building with vast marble hallways that had once housed the czar's Corn Taxapparat.Ilya Goldman was very nearly alone in the building on Christmas Eve--most of the senior officers seemed to be down with the flu or engaged in important business outside the office. Perhaps, Ilya thought, they were engaged in the surveillance of _Dedushka Moroz,__ Father Frost, as he visited children on the night before Christmas. In any event, Captain Ilya Goldman was a Jew and, as such, found it productive not to have the flu or important business elsewhere on Christmas Eve, and had volunteered to work a double shift and assume the responsibility of night duty officer. He dug away at his paperwork until a little after midnight, then strolled down the corridor to the office of Major General Lyu-zhenko, whose chief responsibility was the suppression of the occasional uprising within the camp populations. Held chosen Lyuzhenko, a particularly nasty brute with a savage temper, rather carefully, for the man was, in Ilya's scheme of things, about to commit the single honorable act of his life. One could, when the fat was in the fire, hear him all over the seventh floor--screaming on the telephone, cursing, almost weeping with rage. Lyuzhenko had locked his office door, but to Captain Goldman, trained as he was by the NKVD, that did not present a serious problem. Ilya turned on the office lights and rummaged through the files until he found a packet of transfer forms. He put one in Lyuzhenko's secretary's typewriter and filled it out, making all the proper marks in the appropriate boxes. Under the heading _Reason for Transfer__ he wrote: "By order of Major General Lyuzhenko. " That had been reason enough in the past, it would be now. He found a letter signed by the general, slid it beneath the transfer and traced out the signature, using a pen from the desk drawer. He turned off the lights, locked up the office, and proceeded down the hall, collecting three countersignatures in precisely the same manner in three other offices. He then deposited the transfer in the Action box on the desk of the commanding officer's secretary and Sascha Vonetswas on his way to Belgorod-Dnestrovskij. . How quickly, Ilya thought, the Soviet bureaucracy could move when it wanted to. He left the building, walking along Ulyanovskaya Street for several blocks, then turning north toward one of the buildings given over to the Ministries of Transport (Internal). The door guard, seeing his NKVD uniform, let him in without question. Who knew what business these people might be about, even on what used to be Christmas Eve. The hallways of this particular ministry were even grander than his own, and each floor had its own cleaning lady, traditional Russianbabasin kerchiefs who spent the long night down on their knees with buckets of soapy water and hard brushes, rubbing away at the heelmarks of the previous day's boots. On the third floor, Ilya walked carefully along die wet marble, his footsteps echoing down the empty corridor. He found the third-floor cleaning lady just outside an office door marked Bureau of Streetcar Maintenance--Assistant to the Deputy Director. She was all in black, large breasts swaying within an old cotton dress as she scrubbed, humming to herself, absorbed in this work that would go on night after night, apparently forever. She saw him approach and stand before her but took no notice of him, he was just another pair of boots. When he handed her a slip of brown paper with tiny printing crammed on one side and the coded name of an addressee on the other she took no notice of that either, simply tucked it away somewhere inside her dress with one hand while scrubbing away with the other. Back on Ulyanovskaya Street, Ilya walked slowly toward his office. The night was icy cold and clear, a million stars overhead. At6:30on the morning of December25,Natalya Federova, a cleaner at the offices of the Ministries of Transport, waited at the Usacheva tram station for the number a6 trolley, which would take her back to the flat she shared with her daughter and son-in-law and their children. By coincidence, her sister's husband, Pavel, took this same route, and six days a week they greeted each other as she got on the trolley to go home and he got off to go to his job. It was snowing lightly, a fine, dry snow of the sort that often went on for days. The trolley was twenty minutes late, but Natalya waited patiently with the other night workers heading home, all of them standing quietly in the falling snow. When the trolley finally did arrive, Pavel was among the last to get off, so they kissed hurriedly and he murmured a salutation--Shrozedestvrom Kristovim, Christ is born--by her ear as their cheeks brushed. He clasped her hand warmly for a moment, then tucked the slip of brown paper away in the pocket of his infantryman's coat. He had lost an eye in the fighting at Stalingrad and wore three ranks of medals on his chest. The brief greeting kept her from being early on the tram, so she had to stand for the hour-and-a-half ride back to her flat. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and gazed pensively out the windows at the passing city, looking forward to the dinner she would have with her sister and Pavel that night. She planned to bake a Christmas bread for the occasion. It would have to be made without eggs, sadly, and raisins were out of the question, but Pavel had received a little packet of powdered sugarat his job, so there would be something sweet for the Christmas meal. A few minutes before seven, Pavel arrived at the Usacheva Street offices of the temporary Belgian mission, where he worked as a porter. Humming to himself, he took out the garbage cans--the big, dented one with food scraps and other "wet materials" would be picked up by a garbage truck. The small wooden one, "dry materials," was mostly office waste, paper trash of all sorts generated by the night shift of communications clerks at the mission, and it was picked up by two men in a black car who never spoke to him. Next, he made a round of the mission offices, making sure the ashtrays were clean and emptying the pencil sharpener shavings into a piece of newspaper. The tiny office at the end of the hall was used by a junior diplomat--a devout Catholic, the grandson of Polish immigrants to Belgium--and after Pavel emptied his pencil shavings on the paper he left him a little something in return: a slip of brown paper, folded once, inserted in the barrel of the pencil sharpener before the canister was wiggled back into place and left upside down, a signal that the mailman had visited. On January10,a Canadian war correspondent was driven west from Moscow to the suburbs of Warsaw, to be on hand when Marshal Zhukov's First White Russian Front, accompanied by units of the Lublin Polish Army, marched in to take official control of the city. Zhukov's divisions had been waiting across the Vistula since August of1944,while the Polish Home Army under General Borfought it out in the streets and sewers of Warsaw with Hitler's Totenkopf(Death's Head) Division. Some quarter of a million Polish _parhzans__ had died in the fighting--only occasionally supplied by the Russians. Thus there would be no resistance from the Peleswhen the Lublin Army, representing the Polish Communist party, took over the administration of the country. The Canadian reporter was entertained on the night of January15by a group of Zhukov's aides. There was great good fellowship and many toasts were drunk. As a cold sun rose on the morning of the sixteenth, the correspondent walked down to the Vistula and stared out at the haze of gray smoke hanging over the burnt-out city. When he returned to the old manor house that served as 36o NIGHT SOLDIERS Zhukov's headquarters, the little slip of brown paper had been removed from the bottom of his sleeping bag. He was glad to see it go. The tiny Cyrillic printing had been beyond his ability to read, but he'd taken special care of the thing while it was in his possession. These little "favors" he did for his Belgian friend made him nervous, but in return he was sometimes permitted to send solid background material off to Canada in the Belgian diplomatic pouch, thus evading the heavy-handed Russian censorship. The newspaper was delighted with these transmissions, spread the material about to protect their source, and had advanced him three pay grades since August. He was glad of that, for he was very much a man who wanted to do well at his work. Josef Volutahad returned to Occupied Poland in the summer of1944,along with two other members of NOV, the Polish Nationalist group made up of loosely affiliated army officers and Roman Catholic priests. They had been ordered to Warsaw to be on hand when their country returned to life but, instead, had witnessed its death. By the end of July, the Poles could virtually taste freedom. July or August, that was the prevailing view. Pessimists spoke in favor of October. The German troops were giving ground, retreating from occupied territory throughout Eastern Europe, leaving behind terrified colonies of German "setders" put in place by Hitler to bring civilization to the "barbarian" lands he had conquered. By July31,even the pessimists were heard whistling on the streets. The First Byelorussian Front under Rokossovsky was ten miles from Warsaw, but Hitler could not seem to bear the thought of losing his beloved Poland--his first conquest by force of arms, his first _amour.__ NOV intelligence nets photographed the arrival of the SSViking and Totenkopfdivisions, the Hermann Goring Division, and the 19th Panzer Brigade. They were the best--the worst--that Hitler could bring to bear. But this did not deter the Polish Home Army, under General Komorovski (known then by hisnom deguerre, General Bor), from rising against the Germans. The Poles had known the Russians for centuries and were indifferent to the distinctions between czars and Bolsheviks. Thus, when Rokossovsky took the city, the Poles Bessarabia�����������������������������������������361 had planned to greet their Russian allies as saviors and liberators, but not conquerors. And not occupation forces. It went quite well in the first weeks. Panzer tanks, induced to enter the narrow alleyways of the old city, discovered themselves unable to maneuver and were then set alight by gasoline and soap bombs with potassium permanganate wicks. When the crews ran from the burning armor, Polish snipers knocked them down. Moscow radio celebrated the uprising, calling out in a September5broadcast for all patriotic Poles to "join battle with the Germans, this time for decisive action!" Throughout the city of Warsaw, partisan units attacked German positions, often at night: lively, sudden, short-range ambushes by running shadows who melted away into the darkness as German reinforcements arrived. By the middle of September, however, the Poles were running out of supplies: food, ammunition, weapons, and especially anesthetics for the wounded. The Russians, still ten miles away across the Vistula, gave permission for British and American supply drops, using Russian airfields for refueling. Thus for four days, beginning on September14,supplies reached the Polish fighters. But, on September18,Russian permission was withdrawn. In the next three days,SSunits inflicted terrible casualties on virtually disarmed _partizan__ groups. Then, on September2 1,a massive resupply effort was initiated--more than two thousand missions flown in a seven-day period. But, on September30,with Polish units fully engaged, the Russians withdrew permission for a second time, and at that point the supply effort ended permanently. By then,250,000Poles had died in the fighting. The Polish Home Army ceased to exist as a unified fighting force and, on October19,Hider determined to destroy that which he could not possess: under his specific orders, German engineers methodically blew the city to pieces. The Lublin Committee--the Soviet-sponsored government-in-exile--condemned the uprising, calling it "futile." On the first day of1945,the Lublin Committee declared itself the legitimate government of Poland. On January17,the Russians finally crossed the Vistula and the First White Russian Front under Zhukov marched triumphant into the city. Volutahad stayed on in Warsaw long after it became clear that the city was doomed. There was always one more thing that had 3� NIGHT SOLDIERS to be done--wounded to be cared for, German positions observed, gasoline bombs to be manufactured, last rites offered. _The partizans__ lived like rats in a city of ghosts, a city that burned for three months and immolated its own dead. Volutapicked wheat grains from the mud to keep from starving, loaded machine-gun belts, performed an operation on a wounded man with a tailor's needle and thread, using wood alcohol as an anesthetic because there simply wasn't anything else. On January3, Volutahad been able to reestablish contact with his base in Vatican City, sending a coded radio message to the NOV communications center. A commercial frequency was used, with a letter code based on Chapter Twelve of the Book of Daniel. The German _radio__r�ragehad almost caught up with him, because he was exhausted and slow on the keys of the transmitter and the sending had taken him much too long. But the driver of the German radio truck had become disoriented in the dense pall of smoke that lay over the city and a few teenagers had come up out of a sewer and turned the truck over, lighting off the gasoline with a strip of shintail run into the tank. Voluta's contact was answered on January9.A fifty-second transmission in Book of Daniel code, ordering him to wait for "an urgent letter" that was moving toward him via the NOV courier system and telling him where and when he could receive it. The latter half of the transmission ordered him to forward this message to "KS" and informed Volutaof his whereabouts. Thus, on the morning of January17,he made his way to a shattered tenement on the edge of what had once been the Jewish"ghetto, where a group of youngsters was busily breaking down--emptying sandbags, tearing apart a wall built of paving stones--a machine-gun emplacement that had somehow survived the destruction of the city. A girl of thirteen greeted him and handed over a small slip of brown paper. They stood together at the edge of an enormous hole that had been blown in the street by a German88round.Volutacould see down into a sewer, where black water flowed sluggishly past, sometimes carrying a body in its current. From the-distance, the sound of a Russian marching band could be heard, brassy and discordant.Volutaread the slip of paper quickly, then put it in his pocket. Bessarabia����������������������������������������363 "Thank you," he said to the girl. Then nodded toward the blare of the music and added, "You must be careful now, you know." She smiled at him, face gray with soot and ash, hands wound with rags against barrel burns from the machine gun, feet lost in a preposterously large pair of Wehrmachttanker's boots. "I shall be, Father," she said to him, "you may be sure of that." "You had no trouble across the river?" "No, Father, no trouble. They were all snoring like _krokodil,__ and, anyhow, I have learned to be invisible." He nodded, said good-bye, then touched her face for a moment. His heart swelled with things to be said but he could say none of them. At nightfall, he left the city, dressed as a laborer. The following morning, dressed as a priest, he crossed through rear-guard elements of the retreating German divisions, giving his blessing to those soldiers who requested it. After that, he headed south and a little west, meaning to deliver the slip of brown paper to the "KS" named by the NOV officers in Rome. The message could have been moved unobtrusively into diplomatic channels--far more efficient than a priest walking by daylight through the battered and frozen countryside--but the NOV officers knew the ways of bureaucrats, knew the fate of paper that sat on desks. So he walked, sometimes riding a little way with a farmer who still had a horse and cart, day after day, often through snow, moving always southwest, along one of the many escape routes--some so old and well used that they were marked by fugitive's huts--that led out of Poland. They had come to Khristo Stoianev in December of1944and asked him to undertake the FELDSPAR mission. They had not threatened him--they were the OSS, not the NKVD--but neither had they relieved him of any obligation he might place upon himself. They were all very well dressed, these people, and they spent money like water, taking him to lunch or dinner over a three-week period and sliding Swiss franc notes from leather wallets and dropping them atop the check on its little plate and not waiting for change. "We don't want you to feel we're putting pressureon you," one of them said in the grand dining room of the Hotel Schwarzwald in Bern, putting extraordinary pressure on him at precisely that moment. "It would," the man said ruefully, knocking cold ash from the bowl of his pipe by smacking it against his palm, "be very dangerous work." "Where is it?" he'd asked. The man put the pipe in his mouth and made a whistling sound by blowing into it a few times, making sure the stem was clear. "Prague," he said. "I cannot speak native Czech," Khristo answered. "No, you can't," the man said, "but you'll do for a Yugoslav. Perhaps a machinist, forced labor, you know the sort of thing." He began to pack tobacco into his pipe from a leather pouch as a waiter came gliding to the table like a swan and began the exquisitely laborious process--silver urn, gleaming hotel china, silver cream pitcher, sugar bowl and tongs--of serving coffee. Who could say no? Who could bear the subsequent weight of Episcopalian disappointment, unvoiced but not uncommunicated, the dreadful undercurrent of icy sympathy extended to those who have proven themselves, at last, cowards and failures. _We don't blame you, of course, it's just not in your nature to accept danger,__ they would say. Or, rather, much worse, they _wouldn't__ say. Yet the approach could be resisted and often enough was--by those to whom survival really was paramount--but Khristo was not among them. His dining companion's eyes twinkled as he sipped his coffee and looked over the rim of his cup. "I'm proud of you. I really am," he said as he set the cup down. "Once this Nazi business is done with"--he lit the pipe at last, and the table was wreathed with drifts of sweet-smelling smoke--"well, there's always the future to consider." It was said as an afterthought, almost, _we know you don't require an inducement, but here's one anyhow.__ -The man's expression, in that moment, had something of the philosopher about it, suggesting he knew all too well that people accepted such missions for reasons of the heart, and that material rewards were of no consequence once the real danger was considered. Thus Khristo found himself bribed and flattered in the same moment. _Wily old bastard,__ hethought, enjoying the performance for the pure virtuosity of it. "Someone has to do it," the man said, shaking his head in wonder at what the world seemed to demand of both of them. And the restaurant bills were nothing compared to what they spent on him after the operation got under way. The NKVD, he thought, would have woven an elaborate conspiracy to achieve the same results, using coercion, ideology--whatever human pressure point could be laid bare. The Americans, on the other hand, fought with money and technology, and they were extravagant with both. They flew Khristo down to OSS headquarters in Bari,Italy, and trained him in the use of the new J-E radio. The Joan-Eleanor communications system had been the brainchild of Lieutenant Commander Steve Simpson, an engineer from RCA, who named the invention after a certain Joan, a WAC major he quite liked, and Eleanor, the wife of his associate,De Witt Goddard.Clandestine communications to that point had depended on the self-descriptive suitcase radio. The J-E radio was six inches long, had an aerial that unfolded to one foot in length, and transmitted to a receiver in a British De Havilland Mosquito--a fast little two-man fighter-bomber with a range of1800miles--circling above the transmission point. And the German _radio riparage__ could not locate a J-E radio. On a quarter-moon night in early January, Khristo Stoianev was parachuted into the Czech countryside south of Prague, the insertion achieved by a B-24 Liberator specially modified for agent drops behind enemy lines. The bomber was painted matte black, making it nearly invisible, even when tracked by German searchlights. The exhaust flame was shielded, the ball turret normally found on the belly of the plane had been removed--altering its silhouette--and a hinged plywood panel installed in its place to serve as exit hatch for the parachutist. The navigator's compartment in the nose of the airplane was sealed off in such a way as to create the total darkness required for visual navigation at night. On a normal bombing run, great numbers of planes flew over a target at20,000feet, protected by fighter squadrons. Agent insertion technology demanded that the plane fly alone,500feet above the ground, at the slowest possible speed--sometimes less than120miles per hour--the sort of contour aviation that demanded some moonlight and a cloudfree night. The navigator followed roads, or moonlight reflected from rivers or lakes. Some of the runs used German concentration camps as beacons, since they were lit brightly all night long to discourage escapes. Khristo landed without difficulty, in the proper location. His papers were excellent forgeries, typed on German typewriters, stamped properly with German inks, and the legend created for him--a fictitious life cycle from birth to present--was indeed as the man with the pipe had suggested it might be. He was a Yugoslav conscript worker of Croatian origin, a machine tool expert and drill-press operator, a valuable asset to the Reich. He carried a thick wad of German Reichsmarksand Czech crowns and an additional sum in gold coins. His map was perfect, guiding him into Prague along the Vltava River in something under six hours once he had stolen a bicycle. He made his way to a safe house, owned by a mathematics teacher, where he was received with cheese dumplings and eggs. The objectives of the FELDSPAR mission were not complicated: he was to collect and transmit data on bombing effectiveness and war factory production in Bohemia, the region of Prague, and prepare for the reception of additional agents. The J-E radio would work very nicely from a roof, and the Mosquito would be circling35,000feet above him at certain prearranged hours of the night, unseen by German antiaircraft crews. There had been no arrangement made for exfiltration; General Patton's Third Army was headed that way at a good clip and they would come to him. If he got into trouble, the Czech underground could move him to the protection of units fighting in the Tatra Mountains to the south. Hundreds of man-hours had clearly been spent on this mission and, to the extent possible, the nature of the operation shielded him from excessive peril. That gave him a certain confidence, reinforced by his NKVD schooling and experience, which trained one to rely on guile and ruthlessness because there was no J-E radio and not enough aviation gasoline for an airplane to fly in circles over the communicating agent. Concentrate, the briefers told him. Know where you are and whomyou are with every second of every day, and if you experience fatigue, treat it as you would a dangerous sickness. Keep incriminating evidence as far away from you as possible--hide _everything.__ When you are out in the streets of Prague, you must _be__ a Yugosla-via'n conscript worker. They used chemicals to remove the nicotine stain from his index finger because cigarettes were sufficiently scarce in Occupied Europe that the yellowish discoloration was now rarely seen. The Czechs you'll be working with, they told him, are _very good,__ espionage has been a high art in Central Europe for hundreds of years. FELDSPAR certainly was, he thought, a mission guaranteed for success as much as any operation of that type could ever be. Perhaps his nerve slipped. He accused himself of that more than once, as January became February and Prague lay under a blanket of dirty ice in the coldest winter in Europe for forty years. He'd left the teacher's house after three days. He had no objective reason to do so--it was simply that the neighborhood felt wrong. He moved to a burned-out warehouse on the eastern edge of the industrial district, a place where barrels of cooking oil had been stored. The building stood three stories high, scorch patterns flared out on the plaster walls above and below the broken windows, and when the rains came in early March, oil that had leached into the cinder loading yard over the years returned to the surface and the smell of it, singed and rancid, hung in the wet air. He lived in what had once been the warehouse office, where a small stove still functioned, bought black market coal at an exorbitant price and lugged it back to his hideout in a metal bucket. And, anytime he went anywhere, he carried a small snub-nosed VZ/27 _he'd__ picked up from his coal supplier. That was something no Yugoslav conscript worker would dare to have, but he had no intention of being taken alive here, not by _these__ Occupation troops, not by _this__ Gestapo. It was a cheap, shoddy weapon, a7.65automatic with a miserly eight-round magazine and a plastic grip, produced under Occupation, with B�sche Waffenfabrik Pragreplacing the usual Czech manufacturer's mark. _This pistol was made in German Bohemia__--the inscription implied--there is no such thing as Czechoslovakia. But there was. The Czechs had insisted on that.

368

NIGHT SOLDIERS

And the well-dressed people in Bern and Bariwho had paid for the lunches hadn't told him about Prague. Oh, they'd told him, in so many words, in rather cool, unemotional language, what the _situation__ was, describing the political climate, analyzing the cultural and economic conditions, characterizing weather, food, religion, local customs--all the empirical data you could want. But Prague, in the winter and early spring of1945,would have required a chorus of the damned to do it true justice. Khristo, when he was out among the people, believed he could actually feel it, like a sickness, a cold, gestating rage that swelled toward the moment of its birth. And the harder the Germans bore down, the more they whipped and tortured and executed, the more it grew. "The day will come," one of his agents had told him, "when we will hang them up by the feet and soak them with gasoline and set them alight. Upside down, you see, so that they do not die too quickly from breathing the smoke. You will be here," the man said. "You will see it." Khristo believed him. It was not a fantasy of the oppressed, it was a plan, a lucid, thought-out ritual of justice, and the day of its reality was not far off. In the Starom�sk�uare, in the old part of the city, there was a medieval clock high on thefa�eof the town hall. When the hour struck, a painted Christ and twelve aposdes would appear one by one in a little window below the clock, followed by the figure of hooded Death, whose bell sounded for the passing of time, then the Turk, the Miser, the Vain Fool, and, at last, the Cock. The Germans found it fascinating--Bohemian folklore displayed for their pleasure--and they would gather below the clock when it struck the hour and point and smile and take photographs. They seemed able to ignore the faces of the Czechs who surrounded them: taut, watchful faces, pale amid the dark clothing that everyone seemed to wear, pale in the perpetual dusk of cloudy days and coal smoke that hung above the city. His principal contact with the Czech underground was named Hlava, a stolid, heavy man who wore eyeglasses with clear plastic frames, a man whose hoarse, measured breathing seemed, to Khristo, a kind of audible melancholia. They sat one seat apart in movie theaters, bumped shoulders in the street as they made brush passes--a scrap of paper moving invisibly from one to Bessarabia�����������������������������������������369 the other--urinated side by side in metal troughs in railway stations, shook hands like old friends in shopping streets just after dark. In one week in February they saw the same German newsreel three times: Hermann Goring, having just shot a bison in his private game preserve, distributed the meat to refugees on the road as they streamed in from Soviet-conquered territories in East Prussia. Hlava was employed as chief bookkeeper in a factory that repaired shot-up Messerschmittfighter planes. Now and then they were able to meet in a situation where actual conversation was possible, and Hlava revealed himself to be a man who told a certain kind of joke. "Three Czechs--a Bohemian, a Slovakian, and a Moravian--meet in heaven. The first one says..."He never laughed at the jokes, simply gazed at Khristo, awaiting a reaction, his breath rasping in and out in a slow, methodical tempo. There were, at any given time, about a dozen other agents. Khristo spent his days bicycling around the city, hard-pressed to make his _treffs__--as the Russians called clandestine meetings. There was a violin teacher whose pupils were mosdy the children of German officers, and she had a way with papers--letters, reports--left lying atop desks in studies. There was a police detective, apparently enough trusted by the Germans to see marginal intelligence distributions. Four or five factory workers, a factory physician, a clerk in the electric utility who fed him data on the daily rise and fall of power usage in certain industrial facilities critical to the German war effort. But then, on March20,he was offered information of a very different sort. It reached him in bed, amid a jumble of sweaty blankets in a hotel room that rented by the hour, reached him as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the waterstained ceiling above him, numb and mindless for the moment, in a blank daze that passed for tranquillity. Magda, she was called, buxom and fat-hipped and exceptionally pink, with a thick yellow braid that fell to the small of her back. Had his controllers known about her, they would have told him he was signing his own death warrant. And she was not the only one; there were others, who drifted into his life, then disappeared: one was dark and looked like a Gypsy, another was very young 37?�����������������������������������NIGHT SOLDIERS and brought him small gifts. There was a seamstress who scented herself with lilac water, and a soldier's widow who dressed all in black. Together, they constituted yet another step into the forbidden zone. Like the burned-out factory where he slept. Like the pistol beneath the horsehair pillow on the hotel bed. He'd been driven to it, somehow, he did not understand why, but something had its fist in his back and forced him into acts which, in his particular circumstances, amounted to dancing blindfolded at the edge of a cliff. The women he knew were not prostitutes, they simply needed money and needed to make love and weren't averse to going to bed with a generous man. And he was generous. "Here, " he'd say, "make sure and eat a good dinner tonight, you look worn out." He knew that he was calling attention to himself, easily the worst thing he could do, but he couldn't stop. Maybe, he thought, his nerve really had slipped. Or was it, perhaps, some premonition about the future that compelled him to a kind of greed, compelled him to take from life anything it might give him. _Christ, __ he thought, you are acting like Sascha Vonets. "Hey you, dreamer, " said Magda, rolling onto her ample stomach and propping her chin on her hands. "I met an old friend of yours. He said, 'That black-haired fellow you see, we used to be pals.'" Magdawas much given to fancy, he didn't take it too seriously. "Oh?" he said. "What did he look like, then?" "Mm, like Death in a play." She was evidently going to spin a tale. Amused, he turned on his side to see her face. "How strange. He carried a scythe, perhaps?" "No, you stupid man. He was thin as a skeleton, with staring eyes and long, bony fingers. A scythe indeed! I was at the Novy Borrestaurant, at the buffet. He just came right up to my table and spoke to me. 'Say hello to him for me,' he said." She moved her face close to his. "Now give me a great big kiss," she said. The truth of it began to reach him and his body tensed. "What are you saying?" he asked, eyes searching her placid face. She made popping noises with her lips. "Kissy," she said, running a fingernail down his flank. Bessarabia�����������������������������������������371 "Is this true? What else did he say?" His voice was quite different now. She pouted for a moment and rolled her eyes--she'd gotten his attention, but it wasn't the sort of attention she'd wanted. "Some silliness about a postal box. B, F, uh, eight something. I don't remember. But there is no such address in Prague. We don't use the alphabet, just numbers. One of your black market friends, no doubt. _Now,__ ungrateful man..." "That's it, all of it?" he said, every nerve in his body humming. "Yes, my little king," she sighed, sorry now that she'd bothered to bring it up, "that's all of it." She snuggled against him and cooed on his chest, her hand walking on two fingers down his belly. He made himself respond, and the cooing became mock-surprised, then appreciative. "Witch!" he said softly by her ear, "you turn a man into a tomcat." He reached across her shoulder, pressed his cigarette out in an ashtray on the bedside table, stroked herback. _Novy__Borrestaurant, he thought, _at the buffet.__ "Meow," she said. Lunch and dinner at the Novy Boron March2 i. A long, narrow room, windows white with steam so that people in the street passed like ghosts, black and white tiles of the floor awash with water from muddy boots, over a hundred people talking in low voices, the clatter of trays, a portrait of Hitler on the yellow wall above the bubbling tea urn. And again on March22,this time aborting a pass from Hlava scheduled for noon. A pass successfully managed at the fallback location on the morning of March23,a page torn from a copybook pressed into his hand: 1.New plant directives specify that workers absenting themselves from the factory for any reason shall be charged with economic sabotage against the Reich and hung without trial, such hangings to take place directly outside the factory as example to ail workers. ?.Two N40milting machines down after gears sabotaged with emery grit. 3.Repair of six ME- log fuselages delayed by oxyacetylene shortage. Resup-pty promised for week of?April. Old-fashioned metal brazing techniques used instead of welding and parts shipped. 4.ME-110 wmg trucked in on18March appears to have taken intensive ground fire from small-bore weapons.'Number J705-12 on wing. Lunch on March23at Novy Bor. Khristosat against the wall opposite the buffet counter. As he was stalling through the last of his beer, Josef Volutaappeared at the table with a bowl of soup on a tray. Almost immediately after he sat down, two old men joined them at the table. "Salt, please,"Volutasaid, handing him a slip of paper beneath the table. Khristo passed him the salt. "Thank you,"Volutasaid. Khristo waited a few minutes and sipped his beer in silence, then rose from the table and went into the toilet, locked the door, and read the small slip of brown paper. When he emerged, Volutawas gone. He sat back down at the table and finished the beer before leaving. Could this be the man, he wondered, that he had known at Arbat Street? His face was gray and lean, features sharpened, eyes too bright. The backs of his hands showed patches of glossy red skin, the mark of recendy healed burns. He had eaten his soup hunched over, face close to the bowl, holding the spoon in his fist, moving with a steady, constant motion--a man servicing a machine. Khristo fought the sudden urge, nearly a compulsion, to find a mirror and look at his face. On one edge of the message from "An NKVD Colonel" a different hand had written the word Sascha.Inwriting that Khristo took to be Voluta's, a message had been penciled on the back of the _paper__-.Jir�uvbridge, March24, 8:05p.m.,then g.15, then10:20.If not, good luck.The message was written in Russian. My God, Khristo thought. Sascha. On the night of March24, 1945, a De Havilland Mosquito circled at35,000feet above the city of Prague. All armament had been removed from the airplane, marginally increasing its range. Even so, the plane would land at the OSS field at Bariwith its fuel tank nearly empty, the round trip between the two cities barely within its capacity. The pilot and navigator wore fur gloves and sheepskin jackets and breadied from an oxygen tank--their problem was altitude, not hostile anti-aircraft fire. Even if the Germans could hear them, they couldn't see them that high up. A four-minute message from the FELDSPAR operative, crouching somewhere on a roof down below, was recorded on a wire-spool machine and flown back to OSS headquarters in Bari. The FELDSPAR committee, responsible for oversight of the operation, was waiting anxiously for the recording. They spent fifteen minutes discussing the information, then sent it on to the typists and clerks. Data on German war production capabilities in Occupied Czechoslovakia was immediately prepared for distribution to various analysis groups. A rather peculiar addition to the message, concerning an NKVD colonel offering material on Soviet intelligence operations in exchange for exfiltration from someplace in Romania, was only briefly discussed. Someone said it sounded like a provocation, somebody else wondered what the hell the FELDSPAR operative was doing with stuff like that--who was he talking to? The Soviet contact was something of a sore subject, because the OSS had had its problems with the NKVD. In1943,they had made attempts to cooperate with their allied service, sending them cryptographic materials, miniature cameras, miniature micro-dot-manufacturing devices, microfilm cameras and projectors, as a gesture of good will. But the good will was not returned. On a trip to Moscow in1944,General Donovan, head of OSS, had been prevented from leaving the USSR for ten days. In the first months of1945,reports from intelligence officers in Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw and other territories recently occupied by Soviet armies indicated that the NKVD was hard at work against its Western allies. Then, in response to a broad pattern of Soviet actions, Donovan had proposed to the Roosevelt administration that the United States continue to maintain an intelligence agency after the war. But J. Edgar Hoover--Donovan's mortal bureaucratic enemy in Washington, D.C.--had learned of this proposal and leaked word of it to several newspapers that shared his views and the American people had been informed, in banner headlines, that a postwar "American Gestapo" was under consideration. There were those in the OSS who now believed--correctly, it turnedout--that the agency had received a mortal wound, and the time of its dismantling was only months away. Information relevant to Soviet intelligence operations was therefore handled by a special committee, so the FELDSPAR product was duly forwarded amid the daily traffic of memoranda, reports, personnel actions, requests for clarification of policy, and proposals for new operations originated by the Ban station. As for the FELDSPAR operative himself, the March24message was his final transmission. Mosquito missions were flown above Prague on March29and on April4, 5,and6,but he was not heard from on those dates and the mission was therefore terminated with the notation that the agent had been neutralized--believed killed or captured by the enemy. The FELDSPAR committee ceased to meet, its members assigned to oversee new operations. It was considered a lousy break. The FELDSPAR operative had been erratic at times, but during his active period he had furnished significant product to the intelligence effort and those who had known him personally had generally liked him. In Prague, the night of March24was cloudy and overcast and there was no wind to stir the dead air. Moving through the blacked-out city, Khristo found it difficult to breathe. Coal smoke poured from the chimneys of the ceaselessly operating factories and hung in the streets like a fog. There was other burning as well: two hundred miles to the north the Russian armies were massed for an assault on the eastern borders of Germany, firing twenty-two thousand field guns in barrages that lit up the evening sky and set whole cities on fire. The distant rumble could be heard all night long and a haze of acrid smoke drifted south, covering Central Europe and blackening the roofs of Prague with a fine, sooty layer of ash. People scrubbed themselves with lye soap but the grime was stubborn and would not leave them, so they tried to live with it, spitting incessantly when the taste of the war in their mouths grew too strong to bear. The7:50p.m.radio transmission from the roof of the warehouse had cost Khristo his first opportunity to meet with Voluta,but there was nothing to be done about that. He just barely managedto make the9:15,trudging along the winding streets like a tired man on his way to work, but Volutadid not appear. Khristo moved away from the bridge, found an unlocked door, and settled down to wait in the narrow hallway of an old tenement, listening to a loud argument in the apartment on the other side of the wall. It was a mother-daughter fight, something to do with money, punctuated by banging and bumping as the two women cleaned the house while they fought. Heading toward the10:20meeting, he found the streets nearly empty--Occupation rules of curfew specified that only those with stamped permits could be on the street after9:00p.m. Ashe walked, a Tatra automobile slowed to have a look at him. Gestapo, he thought. He came almost to a halt and stared apprehensively at the car, like a man about to have his papers checked. This tentative act of submission apparently satisfied the Germans, because the Tatra accelerated and drove off toward the river. At the edge of the small square that faced the Jir�fivbridge, he heard running footsteps and moved quickly against the wall of a building, fingers touching the outline of the pistol in his belt. A heavy man, panting hard, came jogging around the corner and stopped dead when he saw Khristo, his eyes lit with fear. "Run!" he whispered, waving him away with both hands. "There's been a shooting." Khristo ran forward into the square, peering into the darkness. There was something midway across the bridge--a dim shape wedged between the roadway and the sidewalk, a man, he realized, sprawled face down in the gutter, the soles of his shoes resting together at an angle, one arm flung forward, the hand white against the gray pavement. Across the river, a car without lights raced south on Dvorakovo Street, its engine noise rising as it gained speed. He took a deep breath, then sprinted across the open square, the pounding of his boots echoing against the buildingfa�es. Suddenly, a pair of headlights turned a corner at the other end of the bridge, the beams narrowed and intensified by blackout slits. Light fell on the man lying in the street and Khristo knew it was Voluta. The vehicle--he could see it wasa Wehrmachtarmored car--rolled to a stop and a searchlight mounted atopthe roof probed at the body. Khristo heard himself make a wordless exclamation, a small sound of disappointment. He simply stood there for a moment, frozen, unable to think. The shape on the bridge lay still in the spotlight. Finally, he turned his back and walked away, not bothering to run until a static-laden voice crackled from a loudspeaker on the armored car across the bridge and a white beam swept across the deserted square.

As master sergeants,SSSturmscharfiihrers, Geiske and Heist did the work while the officers took the credit. That was generally the way of the world, and certainly the way of the Gestapo, so you lived with it and kept your mouth shut. There were compensations. In1934,when they'd joined the Nazi party, they'd been poor men. Now they had a little put by--there were ample opportunities in counterintelligence work, it only remained to have the courage to take advantage of them. The war, they acknowledged, was the best thing that ever happened to either of them.Sturmscharf�Geiske had been a prison guard in Leibnitz when he got the call, while his partner Heist had worked on the Hamburg docks; they'd both risen quite a way up in the world since then. They were heavy, well-fed men; dark and stolid, and they both smoked cigars, so that when they sat side by side in the black Borgwardthe car sank low on its springs and the interior turned blue-gray with smoke. Their particular war--interrogation cellars, executions--tended to smell bad, and the cigars were a common man's way of dealing with that. The worst corpse in the world hadn't a chance when Geiske and Heist lit up. The battle between the Gestapo and the Czech resistance had been a savage one, and they'd both played a role in its major actions. In 194a, Geiske had taken part in the pursuit of the assassins Gabcik and Kubis--parachuted in by British MI6--who had murdered Reinhard Heydrich,the chief of the Gestapo intelligence service, by rolling a hand grenade under his car. Heydrich had survived the initial wounds--fragments of leather upholstery and uniform buried in his spleen--then died of gangrene. Geiske had helped to organize payment of the$600,000bounty to the Czech who had betrayed the assassination ring, while Heist hadassisted in the interrogation of the young man whose confession had ultimately led to its capture--the boy's collapse under questioning having been facilitated by the presentation of his mother's severed head. The Gestapo had staged a strong reprisal for Hey-drich's murder, arresting ten thousand people, executing the entire population of Lidice, then leveling the town with explosives. From their Borgward,parked discreetly just off Jir�uv Square, Heist and Geiske had observed with interest the unfolding of events on the night of March24. A man had loitered briefly on the bridge just before the9:00p.m.curfew, then melted away quickly into a side street. A second man had walked into the square at9:15,looked about, then retreated much as the first one did. "Better and better," Geiske remarked. Patiently, they waited for the fallback meeting. Entirely unprofessional to have it at the same location, but the two sergeants had seen stranger things in their time. Perhaps a poorly contrived black market exchange, perhaps a situation where extreme necessity had outdistanced caution. Either way, a plus for them. Geiske grunted with satisfaction when the first one showed upagain at10:10. This time he walked onto the bridge with great determination, ignoring the fact that he was alone and there were no crowds to protect him, carrying it off as best he could. Then the Tatraappeared, moving slowly into the square. Geiske and Heist sat forward expectantly--the chemistry of the situation had altered with the addition of the car. "Ah," Heist said, "he gets in." But he did not. The Tatraslowed to a crawl as it reached the man on the bridge, someone in the back seat rolled a window down an inch or two. The man on the bridge glanced at the Tatraand there was a muffled report inside the car and he collapsed, falling forward. He made no move to shield himself as he fell; the marksman had been perfect. The Tatraaccelerated, then turned right at the end of the bridge. Heist snatched the radio handset from beneath the dashboard and reached another unit almost immediately. "For you, my friend," he said in a low voice, "a Tatra headed south on Dvorakovo." "I'll go see to the other one," Geiske said, hauling himself outof the car. He trotted toward one of the side streets and, sure enough, here came the second one, right on schedule. Geiske didn't want him in the square. The Wehrmachtclods in their armored car at the other end of the bridge would likely shoot him, and he didn't want him shot--not just yet. "Run!" he called out. "There's been a shooting." But the second man was as much of a fool as the first, for he went charging off into the square without hesitation. Geiske shrugged and let him go, stepping back into a shadowed doorway and waiting to see what would happen. But the Wehrmachtboys held their fire, simply squawked at him over their loudspeaker and tried to pin him down with a searchlight. Lately, he had noticed, they were all teenage recruits, green as grass and barely trained. He breathed a sigh of relief as the man came back out of the square in a hurry. Perhaps not such a fool after all. Geiske counted slowly to sixty, then sauntered on after him. He had little hope of being able to follow the man for very long--not alone, not in a city where the streets veered and twisted in a devil's maze--but his professional instincts were challenged and he decided to give it his best effort. Heist would understand, you had to take chances now and then, and he was extremely curious about this one, about where he might be headed. He could have arrested him on the spot, but these bastards worked on a certainprinciple: _if I don't come back on time, they've got me.__ That made itdamned difficult to find their friends, no matter how hard you worked in the cellar. But Geiske was lucky. The man ahead of him appeared to be in some sort of daze. He just went slogging along for a time, street after street, taking no elusive action at all. There was one bad moment, when he climbed down a ladder onto a disused spur of railroad track that headed out into the factory district, but Geiske counted again and climbed down after him, then followed at a distance, picking his way along the track among the weed-choked ties. The man in front of him never stopped dead, never turned around, seemed to believe he was alone in the world. Geiske gave himself a bit of credit for that--he "could walk like a cat when he had to. But it was the man himself who made the pursuit possible. When Geiske halted for a moment to listen, the sound of his footsteps never faltered. Geiske the sergeant wasdelighted by such stupidity, though Geiske the hunter, he admitted to himself, was perhaps a little disappointed. As he entered the factory district at the eastern edge of the city, the smoke and fog seemed especially thick and, at the point where the man ahead of him suddenly left the tracks, the smell of burning was particularly bad. They were really catching it tonight, Geiske thought, up north on the Oder where the Russians were working their massed artillery. The entire eastern border was likely on fire, judging from what drifted south. Worse yet, he was below a loading dock that served some sort of warehouse and the stench of rancid oil in the burnt air very nearly made him gag. He patted a row of cigars in his breast pocket, but of course that was out of the question. The sound of footsteps had disappeared, _subject having entered said warehouse.__ The warehouse part was very encouraging, however, so Geiske tried to take shallow breaths and concentrated on great caches of Czech hams and automobile tires. That would make the whole business quite worthwhile. He stood at the base of the loading dock for a time and listened carefully to the silence. Now he missed his partner. He was going to have to go groping around in there alone and he didn't look forward to it. He took a moment to steady his nerve--he'd done this sort of thing many times before. If you kept your wits about you, nothing much could go wrong. He unholstered a Walther automatic and worked the slide, made sure of the pen flashlight in the pocket of his coat, then vaulted up onto the dock. Getting in quietly turned out to be easy: a sliding door had been left partly open. And, once inside, he realized that finding the man wasn't going to be a problem either. The first floor of the warehouse was empty--apparently the place was no longer in use--and a faint glow at the far end indicated a candle burning behind a windowed partition in what must have once been the shipping office. But, candle or not, a sea of darkness lay between him and his quarry and he would have to cross it blind--a flashlight in this black hellhole would shine out like a beacon. He decided to have done with the whole nasty business and walked forward across the warped floorboards at a normal pace. The man in the office might come out at any moment, he too might have a flashlight and a weapon, and Geiske could move quickly as well as silently There was no warning. One moment he was walking, the next he was in space, falling head first, arms flailing. At the basement level, his head struck a charred beam-end that before the fire had been part of the flooring. The blow reversed his rotation so that when he hit the concrete subbasement he landed full on his back. He never screamed, though it took a long second to fall thirty feet, but when he hit the concrete the force of landing blew the breath from his lungs and made a sound like the roar of an animal in an empty cavern. He understood what had happened, understood that a fire had caused the warehouse to be abandoned, had burned through the first floor and the basement, and he called himself several kinds of fool just before he died. "And did you think, perhaps, that just because I let you play between my legs that I was not a patriot?" Magdadid not look at him, her eyes never left the mirror as she prepared to go to war. She had arrayed, on the dressing table, every weapon in her armory: paints, powders, creams, brushes, pencils, tweezers, miniature bottles of scent, and a frightful device that curled her eyelashes upward. Hands darting here and there, she worked like an artist in a frenzy of creation. "That I might refuse you this? That I even _could?"__ she went on. She pressed the end of her finger against the mouth of one of the scent bottles, made a dot on her wrist, shook her arm in the air, sniffed herself, waved some more, sniffed again, made a face, then went on to the next bottle and began the process all over again. "Whatever else you may be, you are a thorough idiot about women," she said, pausing to color an eyelid blue, "about Czech women certainly." He had stood outside Magda's flat in the early hours of the morning. Her husband, she had once told him, was a postman. When he saw a postman--a strutting little man with a cavalry mustache, something of the old Austro-Hungarian bureaucrat about him--march off to work, he'd taken the chance and knocked on her door. Explained to her what needed to be done, telling her as little as possible about himself, but insisting on the danger of it. "You could regret it," he had said. She was affronted that he did not _know__ she would do what he asked of her. As would her friends. A neighbor boy had been dispatched with what amounted to a queen's message to her most favored ladies-in-waiting. When the boy returned, to accept a half-crown piece and a kiss that widened his eyes, the answer was yes in every case. At which news she turned to him triumphantly and said, "So!" Gimlet-eyed, cheeks rouged in circles, lips carmine, something like a witch in a pageant, he thought, she announced, "Now you see what we are made of!" When her hair was brushed out in a wild blond spray, she began the lengthy process of pinning it up, driving each hairpin home with a determined thrust of her index finger. Next she ran about in her underwear, rummaging through her wardrobe, a final show for him before he left Prague. No matter what else might be going on, she wanted him to suffer a little for giving her up. They gathered at midafternoon on March25,a strange exfiltration team indeed, he thought,Utaand Ermaand Marie and Bibi--he never knew which one was which--in a staggering variety of feathers and scarves and little hats and tail-biting fox furs slung carelessly around their powdered necks, and the little balding cab-driver called Rudi,who was already drunk and lurched between hysterical lust, surrounded by so much delicious flesh, and quaking terror, in contemplation of what he was about to do. His taxicab was a modified Skoda--a barrel of kerosene mounted on struts where the trunk had once been, a pungent black cloud boiling from the exhaust pipe when he started the thing up. Because the taxi had no trunk, they put Khristo on the floor in front of the back seat, covered their laps and him with a giant eiderdown quilt, and rested their feet on his back. Thus he went to Bratislava. They had told him, in Bari, that he should get out if he thought the Germans were on to him. "You might last a week," they told him, "on the roofs and in the alleys, but it's just a matter of time." They had told him, if he was betrayed or identified or under suspicion, to go south to the Tatra Mountains, to join a _partizan__ group and wait for Patton's Third Army. Well, Bratislava was south, at the foot of the Little Carpathians. And Volutahad died because there was more to the message than could be written on a slip of paper, so he had to ask himself what it might have been that could not be committed to writing. A request, he thought, _please do this. __ And _doing this__ did not just mean passing the information on to an intelligence service. Voluta, he believed, had been in Poland. When the Russians took over--people in Prague had spoken of it with fear in their eyes--he'd had to run. There was no plan, no technical arrangement, for him to go from Warsaw to Prague--the old escape route for Protestants fleeing religious persecution, across the Krkno�Mountains in northern Czechoslovakia. He had just set out to walk it. And the Russians had got onto him. It was not the Gestapo in the automobile he had seen driving away from the bridge, of that he was sure. Then, there were the mechanics of the meeting itself--poorly planned, the work of a sick, exhausted man. He realized that Voluta, a lifelong craftsman of clandestine practice, had acted, in his last hours, like an amateur. No matter. Voluta, through his friends, had contrived to give him his freedom from prison and, years later, had died trying to tell him, _tell__ him, in human words and not in secret notes, that Sascha Vonetshad to be collected. He could, perhaps, defend the decision to terminate FELDSPAR. The man who had fallen into the subbasement had been an SSSturmscharf�a Gestapo sergeant. He would do as a reason if reasons were, sometime, to matter. And, somewhere, well back in the chain, was Ilya Goldman--for who else could have reached down into the Gulag system? BF825had finally become real, had taken on a life of its own, and he was now a prisoner of its obligations. That did not much worry him. What did was that Volutahad known where he was.The system that had contrived and supported the FELDSPAR mission had been somehow penetrated--by a friendly service, it was true, but who in turn might have a view of their operations? They were brave, the Americans, and ingenious to a fault, but they neither liked nor understood security. That took an iron fist, and they and their forefathers had fled the iron fists of the world since the beginning of their country. He did not know what the OSS would think about it, wouldthink about some colonel who said he would be in Sfintu Gheorghe on12April with what he claimed to be depth intelligence on NKVD personnel and actions. There were a million pieces of information every day in a war, like fish in the sea. Which one is the right fish? Someone, somewhere, would make a decision, a practical decision, a logistical decision, a _political__ decision, finally, based on who had what power at any given moment, based--because the USSR was an ally--on thelevantinepolitics of alliance, based on the positions of the planets and the stars. If it were one sort of a decision, they would be at Sfintu Gheorghe. If not, not. In the mad taxi, the first bottle of plum brandy was long gone by the time they got to Vlasim, the second well down before they reached Brno. German roadblocks stopped them every few miles because they were headed east, headed straight into the war, headed into Malinovsky's Second Ukrainian Front that had swept up from the Danube and fought its way across the Dukla Pass in the Carpathians to attack the town of Nitra, only forty miles north and east of Bratislava. Magda, in the front seat next to Rudi, took charge at the roadblocks. "We are on our way to a party, to see our Wehrmachtfriends in Bratislava." One last bash, apparently. The Germans saw no good reason to stop them. Khristo lay beneath the eiderdown and listened to the exchanges, his nose full of the mingled aromas of powder, scent, sweat and the alcoholic fume of the brandy. Driving away from the roadblocks, Rudi's taxi left a pall of kerosene smoke as it went weaving back and forth across the road, making Khristo slightly seasick with unexpected swerves he could not balance against. Time and again, German military trucks and tanks drove them off the pavement while the women screamed with laughter at all the bouncing and jouncing and Rudiswore like a little madman. Encountering them, some of the German sentries laughed wildly and shouted their approval in very graphic terms. They knew that Malinovsky was coming, they knew what would happen to them, yet behold these bosomy Czech girls, off to _ficker__ their German boyfriends one last time. Twilight of the gods--spring,1945.It appealed to their sense of doom. Waved through the roadblock, the Skoda sputtered to life and off they went again, the women screaming at Rudi, insulting or praising his manhood. Rudidrove the taxi and they drove Rudi, singing dirty songs and working their way through a third bottle, pouring some down the driver to keep his courage afloat as the road began to curve and climb. At one of the last sentry posts, a hand reached in through the back window and lifted the edge of the quilt where it lay over the knees of the woman closest to the door. Khristo froze, stopped breathing as the upper corner of his hiding place was peeled back. Then came the sound of a hand being slapped, six inches from his ear, followed by a raucous bedroom chuckle. "Bad Fritzi!" said a voice above him. "Trying to look up my dress? Shame on you and your naughty eyes, what would your dear _Mutter__ say if she knew?" There was more laughter, both within and without the car; the window was rolled back up and the taxi rumbled off, swerving back and forth across the road to Bratislava. In Bratislava, they had boys strung up on the lamppost standards. These were not the old-timers, the ones who'd been in Russia and learned to survive anything; these were conscripts, sixteen and seventeen, and they'd faced the Russian guns and realized that Hitler was finished and nobody wanted to be the last one to die in the war. So they'd scampered over the nearest hill, planning to live in the woods like boy scouts until all the scary stuff was over and they could go home. The Gestapo caught most of them. Bound them hand and foot and hung them on short ropes from the lamppost standards, their shoes only six inches from the ground, each one wearing a hand-lettered paper sign around his neck on a string: Der �erl�er,"I am a deserter"--in the same way they used to make them wear the/am a duncesign in school. Their eyes were wide open. What worried Khristo in Bratislava was being dragooned by the Wehrmacht, given a rifle, and told to hold a position. His papers might be good here if he talked fast and convinced somebody that he didn't need a travel pass outside Prague, but he wasn't willing to chance it. They were getting ready to die in Bratislava and it had made them very serious. The city was much too quiet. He found an alley behind a bombed-out house, crawleddown a hole into a watery basement, and waited until after midnight to move any farther. The city was blacked out and deserted. Now and then he could hear the whine and rumble of tanks changing positions; the Second Ukrainian Front was shelling Nitra, forty miles away, coloring the night clouds with a reddish cast, but that was all, even the insects were silent here. He worked his way through the darkness, past German street patrols, and discovered an abandoned shed at the western edge of the docks where he had a clear view of the river. By a slight shimmer of moonlight he could see the slow eddies and whorls the river made when the current ran full in the spring. This was the Czech Dunaj; it would be the Hungarian Duna in afew miles, then the Dunav in Yugoslavian Serbia, the Dun�ain Romania, then the Dunaj again, in Bulgaria, but it was all the same river, the Danube. He recognized this water, the rhythm of its slow, heavy course, the way it gathered the night's darkness and ran black. For a long time he leaned against a wooden beam in the shed and watched it flow past him. He was isolated--for the first time in a very long time, he realized. The J-E radio he had destroyed according to specifications--smashed to bits and distributed piecemeal along a mile of canal in Prague. For the moment, Magdaand her friends knew where he was, but he would leave here soon, and then no one would know. He needed a boat--the low shapes of hulls along the dock were just visible in the quarter moon--almost anything would do. He would make it, he told himself. He knew the river and, if he survived the initial part of the journey, he would know people along the river. He was a thousand miles from Sfintu Gheorghe; he had seventeen days to get there. He checked the current again, watched the white curl of water at the foot of a pier stanchion. A spring current. He could do it. He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Dunacame crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria. He would have to negotiate the delta, up in Bessarabian Romania, a thousand square miles of meandering, reed-choked channels. He would have to go past Vidin, past his mother and father and sister, if they were alive, without seeing them. For their own safety he would have to do that. But from the river he would send his spirit to see them; it was something, better than nothing. _Probably,__ he thought, I should not permit myself to feel this way, to feel this hope. There were Germansoldiers hanging from lampposts in the streets of Bratislava, and the oudines of the riverport cranes were broken, twisted skeletons from the American bombing, but he knew this river, he had left a part of himself with it all these years, and he was surprised to find that it was still there waiting for him. He must have dozed, for he snapped into consciousness as a drone rose higher and higher until it became a full-throttle roar. The hour was barely dawn, the river ran silver in the grayish light, and just east of his vantage point a tug was pulling a barge upstream. It was a heavy barge, and the tug was only just making headway against the current. The two planes flew side by side up the river--the gunports on their wings twinkling briefly as they passed over the barge--then broke off the attack, climbed steeply as their engines screamed, banked into tight, ascending turns, and headed back for another pass. He knew the silhouette: they were P-39 Airacobras, fighter planes of American manufacture with the red stars of the Soviet air force on their wings. To see what they were shooting at, he narrowed his eyes and stared into the faint light: gray bundles, tight ranks of them pressed together on every available foot of barge space. As the Russian pilots made their second strafing run, one of the bundles rolled over the side and vanished in the river. They were German wounded, he realized, probably casualties of the fighting in Nitra, barged down the river Nitra into the Danube, now headed west to Austrian field hospitals. The fighter planes' guns mowed from the stern of the barge to the foredeck of the tug as he watched. Just as they broke off the second attack, a fountain of ack-ack tracer flowed upward from the dock area, falling far short of the climbing planes, and a figure in black ran from the pilothouse of the tug and began swinging something at the towing bitt on-the aft deck. His motions were frantic, and Khristo realized he was chopping at the towline with an ax. As the Airacobras came around the third time, the barge broke free and began floating backward, downstream in the current, and the tug headed toward the bank, attempting to crawl in under the protection of the anti-aircraft fire. He broke from the shed in a dead run as the planes harried the tugboat, headed for the river. The cold of it exploded in his head as he dove in, and the shock caused him to take a sickening mouthful of oily water--the iridescent sheen was all around him. Keeping his face out of the river, he struggled toward the tugboat, the weight of clothing and shoes dragging him down. The roar of the incoming planes rang in his ears, then they were gone. He had tried to calculate a safe angle of intersection--heading well upstream of the tugboat when he entered the water--but the river was taking him. He dug his arms in as hard as he could, told himself he was getting it done, slicing through the current. A look at the boat showed him he was wrong. He was losing ground with every stroke. He ducked his head below the surface and kicked like a maniac to keep his body straight, driving the hard water beneath him as he brought his arms through. When his air was gone he came up gasping and tasted oil in his throat. The tug was near, he'd gained a few feet, but he was sliding past it and the hammering pulse of the propeller shaft felt as though it was on top of him. He lunged through the water, flailing his arms, then kicked his weight upward and got one hand through the rope lashing that looped along the hull. Dragged against the swell, his body created a wave that almost drowned him. He fought above it, snatching the rope with his other hand and holding on for his life. The motion of the boat drove him against the hull and he tried to thrust himself farther up the rope by shoving his feet against the wood, but it was slippery as wet ice and he couldn't do it. _Oh well,__ he thought, amused by his predicament, a grand euphoria rising within him. Then he realized that the cold had invaded his mind, that he could die snagged on the hull, the strange dreamy death that came from immersion in cold water. In terror, he hauled frantically at the rope and his body sprang loose from the river, and then he had the rope under his arms and was inching his way up the loop, struggling toward its height and getting one hand hooked like a claw on top of the deck bulwark. He looked up, noted casually that blood was welling from beneath his fingernails, running pink as it mixed with water, then hungall his weight on the hand in order to swing one foot up on the bulwark. He pleaded for strength, then rolled himself over, falling three feet and landing deadweight on the planking of the deck. He lost himself for a time, then discovered the fading drone of airplane engines and the throbbing of the tug's pistons and returned to the world. The night before, he had studied the river from a distance, finding consolation in its slow, dark motion. A man of the world, who had walked the streets of Paris. Now he remembered himself as a little boy, guided by the lore of older kids, throwing a few crumbs of bread in the river before he would even dare to put a foot in the water. Gun in hand, he crawled along the curve of the bulwark until he reached the pilot's cabin, which was set just forward of the small deckhouse that served as the tug's living quarters. Inside, a woman was at the helm, adjusting the large spoked wheel, watching the water ahead of her with unmoving eyes. A bearded man in a black uniform sat against the far wall of the cabin, eyes closed, knees pulled up, hands clasped across his stomach, chest moving slightly as he breathed. An old-fashioned machine gun--upepecha, with rough wooden stock and pan magazine--lay at his feet, and a trickle of blood ran across the deck from somewhere beneath him. The pilot glanced at Khristo, then returned her attention to the river. She was immense, a solid block of a woman in carpet slippers and black socks and a flowered print dress that hung down like a tent. Above the socks, her white ankles were webbed with blue veins--the result, he realized, of a lifetime spent standing at the helm. Her face, in profile, featured an enormous bulb of a nose, a massive, square jaw, and salt and pepper hair scissored in a line across the nape of her neck. She was, he guessed, well into her fifties. She spoke to him briefly in a language he did not at first understand, then realized was Hungarian. Next, she tried him in rapid German. He shook his head dumbly and started to shiver in the cool dawn air. "Who is he?" he said in Czech, nodding at the man on the floor. "Hlinka," she said. The Hlinka, he knew, was a Slovakian fascist militia that fought alongside the Germans. "Your guard?" he asked, purposely vague. A guard could protect you or hold you prisoner. She declined the trap. "What do you want?" she said in Czech. "Here it is forbidden to refugees," she added. With authority, just in case he was something the Germans had thought up to test her loyalty. He did not answer immediately. She shrugged, went back to work, changing course a point or two to avoid a Whitewater snag some way upriver. "I want to go east, mother," he said, using a term of respect. "I am not your mother," she said. "And they are fighting east of here. And if you try to shoot that thing it will piss on your foot." He looked down to see water dripping from the barrel of the Czech automatic. He stuck it back in his belt, then reached into his pocket and brought out the gold coins--there were sixteen, each a solid ounce--and sprayed them across the metal shelf by the helm so that they made a great ringing clatter. She moved her lips as she counted them, then gave him a good, long look, taking in his worker's clothing--wool jacket and pants, heavy boots, peaked cap stuffed in side pocket--and staring him full in the face before she went back to watching the river. "Who are you, then?" she said. "And spare me the horseshit, if you don't mind." Her tone was courteous, but bore the suggestion that she could throw him back overboard anytime she felt like it. He looked at her arms. She could do it easily, he realized. "I am from the river, like you." He said it in Bulgarian. She nodded and thought it over. "That is a fortune," she said, switching into Russian, knowing he would understand it. "A lot of gold for a river boy." She paused for a time, ruminating on things, as the tug slid past the snag. She'd given it just enough room for safety, not so much as to waste fuel. "What is your name?" he asked. "My official name you don't need to know," she said. "On the river I am called Annika." "If you turn your boat around, Annika, they will think that you are going back downstream for the barge, and they will not send a patrol boat out from Bratislava." "Smart, too," she said, "for a river boy." He did not press her further. She picked up one of the coins and studied it front and back, then tossed it onto the shelf. She mumbled to herself in Hungarian for a time--curses, he suspected, from the choppy rhythm of it, aimed at Germans, Russians, gold, rivers, boats, him, and likely herself and her fate as well--then spun the wheel toward the far bank. The rudder responded and the tug swung slowly in the direction of the shore, the course change preparatory to coming about and heading east. "My Hlinka watchdog," she said, "he still lives?" Khristo looked at the man. "Yes," he said. "He crawled in here for company while he died," she said. "That much we give him." He nodded his agreement. "When he's gone," she continued, "pitch him overboard. On my boat, you must work." She was a small tug, so wide-beamed in the middle and high in the bow she seemed half submerged. Her current name, _K-24,__ was just barely visible amid the rust stains and moss green patches on her hull. She had been designated _K-24__m _l94�<__ when Hungary had joined the Axis powers. Aside from a few gunboats and a small fleet of tugs and barges, Hungary had no navy. It had no coastline and no access to the sea, though it was governed by an admiral,Mikl�orthy, throughout the war. The tug had been launched in1908at a dockyard near Szeged and christened the Tuza,after the river on which the city was located. She was forty feet long, built low to the water in order to slide beneath the old Danube bridges. Her steam engine was Austrian, a simple boiler that put forth200horsepower on a good day and would burn coal or wood but in its time had run on straw, hay, cotton waste or anything else that could be set on fire. When the Americans were bombing up and down the river--hitting the Romanian oil transfer points at Giorgiu and Constanta, finally taking out the oilfields at Ploesti--she had been regularly strafed, something about the slow progress of a tug inciting turret gunners to a frenzy as they passed above her. One fighter pilot--"a splendid idiot" was the way Annikaput it--had spent the better part of a half hour machine-gunning a bargeload of gravel,to no particular point, having first nearly melted his barrels in fruitless attacks on the _Tisza's__ pilothouse, which was covered by a two-inch sheet of iron plating painted to look like a wooden roof. The _Tisza__ had, in four years of war, taken its share of hits at the waterline, in the engine boiler and the smokestack, but these were easily enough patched. She was, Annikaadmitted, an old lady and a noisy one. Her pistons hammered relentlessly as she ran, and you could hear her coming a good way off, ticking like a clock gone mad. "A _dirty__ old lady," Annika's husband had called her, in the days before the war. Her stack--chopped off a few feet above the roof level of the pilothouse because of this or that bridge--trailed sooty clouds of smoke into the sky, black, gray, or white, depending on what they had to burn that day. Leaving Bratislava, the smoke was black as they used up the last of the Czechoslovakian coal. "From here on, it's brushwood,"Annikatold him, casting a meaningful eye toward the double-bitted ax that stood in one corner of the pilothouse. "She'll run on trash, if she must." The Danube grew its own fuel, abundant softwoods--alder, willow, big-leaf maple--that lined its banks and drank its water. It was light, fibrous stuff that grew up in a year and burned up in a minute but it was abundant, and the _Tisza__ had never minded it. "Thank the Lord for the current,"Annikasaid, "and for a load of one river boy rather than a barge of sand." Just south of the Bratislava docks, the river became the north-south boundary between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, passing entirely into Hungarian territory at the town of Sturovo. In mid-afternoon, Khristo hid belowdecks, behind a coal bin next to the boiler, where he at last dried out while the Hungarian border guards came aboard to joke with Annikaand consume several bottles of beer and a tin of jam. When they'd gone, Annikacame down the hatchway and showed him how to stoke the boiler and manage the primitive gearing system that changed propeller pitch. "Three speeds," she said, "all slow. And if we have to go backward, I come and show you. You must be a little bit the mechanic." But for most of the day, not much was demanded of him. He stood by Annika's side and watched the shore as they movedthrough the vast Hungarian plain. It was a March afternoon on the river as he remembered it, cold and gray, with racing clouds above and occasional moments of sunlight passing into sudden rain squalls that roughed up the surface of the water, then disappeared. They went past odd little towns full of bulbous shapes and steeply pitched roofs with storks' nests woven into the eaves. Deserted towns, they seemed; only a few skinny dogs came down to the water to bark at them. Perhaps the people had fled as the fighting moved toward them--west to the German lines or east to the Russian. He did see the barge of wounded Germans, what was left of them, being towed upriver by another tug with whom Annikaexchanged a greeting of whistle blasts. Sometimes the sky cleared, revealing the low Carpathians in the northern distance, sun shafts piercing the cloud and lighting the ridges a pale green. In the late afternoon they pulled into the harbor at Sz�nd tied up next to a line of tugs, some of them joined to empty barges. Annikawent off visiting, hopping nimbly in her carpet slippers from deck to deck, stopping at each pilothouse to gossip and exchange news. It was dark by the time she returned. They sat together by a miniature parlor stove in the kitchen area of the crew quarters--two hammocks and a battered old wardrobe chest--while Annikaadded water to flour and rolled up _csipetke,__ tiny dumplings, boiled, them in a pot of water, and added some dense tomato sauce from a tin can, then a single clove of garlic--"to make it taste like _something"__--squeezed flat between thumb and forefinger before ceremonial addition to the stew. "Oh, for an egg," she said sadly, "or a pinch of rose pepper. You would love me forever." In Prague, Khristo had lived on bread that was part sawdust, and horsemeat stewed with onions to hide the spoiled taste, and he wolfed down his portion of dumplings in sauce. "I'm in love with you already," he said. "Well, there's enough of it," she said, referring to a stack of zinc-colored cans of tomato sauce piled up on a shelf. "There used to be fish," she said, "but the bomb concussions have done for them. Big ones, catfish with whiskers. _Strong__--but cooked in milk they were sweet.Ach"--she shut her eyes and grimaced in sorrow--"this stupid war is a curse. It took my husband, bothsons, most of the men on the river. The winter of'43got them, retreating from Moscow in the snow, so cold that when they took their pants down by the side of the road, they froze up back there and died." Her mouth tightened at the thought and she crossed herself. "One or two came back. Husks. Good for nothing after that--they'd seen top much." She cleaned her bowl with a thumb and licked off the last of the tomato sauce. "They are fighting east of us, just as I warned you. Near the prison at V� downriver from the bend at Esztergom. The Hungarian Third Army, they say, what's left of it, and the Sixth Panzer, facing the Third Ukrainian. Mongolian troops, river boy, they fight on vodka and if you're a woman, God help you die quick. They haven't been here for a thousand years, yet we've never forgotten them. They surrounded forty-five thousand German troops up by Lake Balaton, and _pfft,__ that was that." "What are people saying?" Khristo asked. "Well, the Russians have got Budapest, so that's the end of the government. No great loss. Some say the thing to do is cross over the lines, surrender to the Red Army--others want to wait here. The Russians will need us. They'll pay something, at least, to have their supplies move on the river." "And so?" "Some of us are going to try to sneak through tonight. Maybe they stop fighting and have a snooze." "I doubt it." "So do I. How far east are you going?" "I'll tell you when we get there," he said. "So I guessed." "Have you got anything black? Like paint?" "Paint! You are crazed. Some tar, maybe." "It will do," he said. They chugged slowly out of Sz�arbor just after midnight, eight tugboats moving in single file along the dark river. Since they could expect to be under observation by Hungarian and Wehrmachtrearguard units, each flew the flag of the collapsed Hungarian regime on the short pole astern. The best navigator of the group, a stooped old man called Janos, took the lead inhis boat, followed by _Tisza__ and the others. The moon was fully risen, but the spring westerly had increased its force and a low scud of cloud obscured the light, leaving the river in drifting shadows. Difficulty of navigation was increased by a drop in temperature that brought a heavy mist off the water, swirling in the wind as it blew downstream. This made Janos's job harder, but turned the boats into ghostly, uncertain outlines from the perspective of the shore. Of Janos, Annikasaid, "He is half blind, so the darkness will not bother him. He navigates with his feet, he says. By the run of the water under the keel he knows his way." "Is that possible?" Khristo asked. "He is on the river since childhood. Thus he is a good navigator, also a good liar. Take your pick." Standing in the pilothouse, Khristo could feel only the rapid pulse of _Tisza's__ engines. Yet the boat ahead of them moved slowly back and forth from the center to the starboard bank of the river, as though it were avoiding hazards, and the rush of water passing over a sandbar shoal could be heard to one side of the boat as they moved around it. "A sandbar," Khristo said. "He has taken us away from it." "Ja, ja,"Annikasaid, unimpressed. "A famous sandbar, one that everybody knows. What you and I must worry about are the new ones. Danubio--the god of this river--stirs his mud up every winter and leaves it in different places, so that we may find it with our propellers." She made a small correction with the wheel, apparently following some motion of the lead boat's stern that was invisible to him. "A way down from here, there are granite blocks under the water, quarried by the Romans as piers for a bridge. The emperor Trajan desired to build a military road, from Spain to the Euphrates River, but he died. He left us his granite to remember him by and, when the water is low and there is sand on both sides of the river, it will peel the bottom of a boat clean off. I have seen it." They were silent for a time, staring ahead of them through the drifting fog. "Do you want me down below?" he asked. "No," she said. "Stay up here with me and keep the _pepecha__ handy. We are going full slow as it is, and if something happens you don't want to be belowdecks." He thought of steam under pressure and what it could do and was thankful for the dispensation. "What use will the _pepecha__ be against field guns?" She shrugged. "Not much." The river meandered north and south at Esztergom, then swung around in a sharp bend by the V�rison and headed due south, toward Budapest and eventually into Serbian Yugoslavia. They could hear the fighting well enough, like an approaching thunderstorm, and the sky flickered a dull orange with artillery and tank barrages, but most of the action seemed to be centered north of the river. Moving along the northward curve toward Esztergom, a searchlight cut through the fog and raced forward from the last boat to the first, then pinned Janos's tug in its beam. A loudhailer, sounding eerily close over the water, called out a command in Hungarian. As Janos, shouting in a cracked voice, answered the unseen officer, Annikatranslated into Russian: "Convoy leader, identify yourself." "K-38and seven K-class tugs--out of Bratislava." "Where bound?" "V�rison." "Say again, _K-38."__ "V�rison." "Have you gone mad?" "Long ago." "The Russians are up there. Are you under orders?" "Yes, sir. To remove special prisoners to the rear." "Written orders?" "Verbal orders. From the SS. AGerman colonel accompanies us, would you like to hear it from him? I can wake him up for you." "Proceed, _K-38."__ "Thank you." "God help you." "One hopes." The searchlight blinked out, and the running lights of the patrol boat faded away as it returned to station in midstream. The convoy steamed on into the darkness, its slow progress taking them toward the steady beat of artillery exchanges in thehills above Vac. They could now see yellow muzzle flashes on the ridgelines, and a piece of burning debris arced gracefully above them and hissed into the water. At first, the bass thudding of the gunnery was a massive rumble, low and continuous, that rolled and echoed above the river. But as they drew closer, the sound resolved into separate parts: the low thump of field mortars, the whistle of Wehrmacht88s and the sigh of Russian field-gun rounds, the rhythmic crackle of machine-gun fire and the muffled impacts of exploding shells. As they steamed around a bend in the river, the horizon glowed brighter and brighter and the sound swelled in volume. Then they were in the middle of it. It was like a nightmare, he thought, because he wanted to run but could not move. His eyes streamed with tears from the billowing smoke--suddenly every object was blurred and misshapen. The prison on the far bank was burning, towers of flame from the roof and cell windows rolling into the sky as though sucked upward by an immense wind. The air around him buzzed and sang, and he thought he could hear voices from the near bank, calling out in a strange language, and a huge shower of sparks rained down on the boat. Then the water exploded, a white wall, and the river rocked backward. The window glass trembled and water sprayed across it, a prism refracting clouds of tracer, the fiery prison, the shore ahead stuttering from white light to blind darkness and back again. He went deaf. Braced himself against the pilothouse wall and felt the _Tisza__ taking fire, like an animal kicking the hull. The stern of _K-38__ began to move away from them and Khristo tore himself from the wall and ran crouched along the deck, throwing the hatch back and jumping six feet into the hold. He opened the boiler door with a bare hand--saw the red stripe across his palm but felt nothing. He piled armloads of brushwood through the opening, kicking it into the roaring furnace as it snagged on the rim, bowed and resisted as though it did not want to burn. The _Tisza__ rocked again. He slammed the door with his boot and leaped up the ladder onto the deck. An enormous yellow flare went off above him and a wind knocked him flat on his face. He scrambled to his knees, ready to swim, then saw that it was the boat behind them. Its pilothouse was gone, stack bent over tothe deck with white steam spraying from one side. As he watched, the boat yawed out toward midriver, a line of little flames licking along the bow. He scurried toward the pilothouse, like a rat in a burning barn, he thought, and saw human shapes onshore, running with the boat, their arms raised in supplication. One of them tried to swim out, then vanished. What they did in Budapest, two days later, seemed entirely ingenuous. That was necessary. Had the tracks of planning and calculation showed through, it would have raised _questions.__ But what he contrived was just simple enough, naive, to have about it a taste of the peasant's innocence, and Khristo well understood what the Russians thought about that-especially those Russians whose job it was to think about things. It made them sentimental, for they saw their former selves in it. Budapest was eighteen miles downriver from the V�rison, just far enough behind the front lines to be, by then, choked withapparatof all sorts. The tugboat captains feared that as much as Khristo did, and river gossip confirmed their fears. There would be no sneaking through a web of those proportions--it had to be confronted. Once the fighting was well behind them, Janos led them into a narrow stream which, at first, did not appear navigable, then widened suddenly and ran four or five miles into the empty countryside. What a dark alley was to a criminal, he thought, this byway to nowhere was to the boats. "When we have no customs stamp, we unload here," was how Annikaput it. "We are all smugglers, of course," she added offhandedly, "some of the time." The tugs tied off to trees on the bank, then everyone fell into a sleep of exhaustion. The following morning, he joined the crews in chopping brush. Annikahad applied lubricating grease to the burn and bound it up with an old engine rag, and the right hand slid up and down the ax handle anyhow, so he was able to manage it. He relished the work, laboring under a pallid sun with his jacket and shirt off, the sweat running down his back. Both blades of the double-bit ax were sharp, and he could take a two-inch trunk down with two or three wallops. Softwood was like that, of course, but hefancied himself a great woodsman nonetheless, the darkness of Prague and the terror of the previous night sweating itself out of him as he hacked at the brush. They made a fire and burned the Hungarian flags, then patched the hulls with canvas and tar, which would have to do until they got to a boatyard. There, he was told, fabled craftsmen could saw out a damaged section of wood and then, almost unbelievably, reproduce the precise curve and size of planking to be tamped back into place with mallets. Then, using a long file called a slick, they would bring the new planking to a perfect harmony with the old hull. And it would never leak. At sunset, they stood in a circle with caps in hand and Janos spoke a short prayer for the lost crew and tugboat. Many of them had been slightly wounded going past V�-a steam scald, a broken wrist, two minor shrapnel injuries, Khristo's burned hand--but they all felt themselves fortunate to see the sun go down that night. They were close to Budapest, there were those who wanted to go on right then and have it over with, but Khristo made a short speech, translated by Annika, and they eventually decided to trust his perception of Soviet bureaucracy--which by nightfall was wobbly at best and sometimes surly, from a full day's vodka ration, and didn't much like the darkness in the first place. The next morning, Annikachose a young, whippy birch and Khristo felled it and trimmed the branches. About his further preparations she was less than pleased, but admitted glumly that it would be for the best if a strong effect were achieved. "It is hard to know with that sort of army," he explained. "Maybe they hug you, maybe they squeeze off half a magazine in your belly. They themselves don't know what they're going to do until the mood takes them." "Ja, ja,"she said, not really convinced he was right. Khristo's preparations had made a grave dent in her supplies, and she felt she might regret that in the future. But she was proud of him later on that day, as they steamed downriver through the center of Budapest, he could see that. He was standing forward of the pilothouse with a ten-year-old boy borrowed for the occasion from another boat--Tiszawas the leader of this convoy, and everybody, Annikaincluded, knew they hadto make an impression. Khristo turned at one point and looked in the pilothouse window and saw a sly and appreciative grin on her face. The noise was overwhelming. There must have been thirty thousand of them--Mongolian troops with European Russian officers--lining the quays of the city as they moved through it. They cheered and waved, raised their _pepechas__ and their old rifles with long bayonets. Some of the officers came to fervent attention. The child next to him, Khristo realized, was meant for the theater. He thrust his little fist into the air with revolutionary passion and scowled patriotically as though he were about to cry with all the emotion of it. Or perhaps, Khristo thought, he came suddenly to believe it. That was surely possible. It was exciting, thrilling, those tens of thousands of voices roaring in unison as the seven boats passed, their crews standing atop the cabins and saluting fiercely, their steam whistles hooting in celebration. The roar increased to thunder as they sailed past the elegant old parliament building that faced the river, the soldiers inside apparently so excited that desks and chairs and a snowstorm of papers came sailing out of the windows. This was Khristo's finest moment.Annikahanded him the _pepe-cha__ through the pilothouse door and, in perfect imitation of a thousand posters, he held it high in one hand--the bandaged one, forearm bulging--shaking the weapon with revolutionary fervor: _fuck with tis and this is what you'll get!__ The soldiers on shore, recognizing their very own weapon, the PPSh M1941,cheered even louder. And when he climbed up the iron ladder onto the roof of the pilothouse and repeated the gesture, using the flag for background, the cheering reached a glorious climax. On both banks, voices were raised in spontaneous singing--the Red Army anthem. A real Soviet flag would not have worked, he knew; it would have puzzled them, made them curious. _Where did he get__iti Who is he? But the huge square of canvas, four feet high and six feet long, roped to a birch pole nailed into the back wall of the pilothouse, then stretched forward by a rope wound around the smokestack, as though it were flying stiff in a fast breeze--that took them past curiosity. That sort of gesture took them in the heart. It was a grand flag: red with tomato sauce, hammer and sickle crudely painted with black tar. On both sides, so that all could see it. Russian press dispatches, for March29, 1945,would include a mention of the incident: "In Budapest, elements of the Hungarian navy overthrew their fascist officers and joined forces with the victorious divisions of Marshal Malinovsky's Third Ukrainian Front in a display of patriotic solidarity." They were arrested, of course, but it was the mildest sort of arrest. Around a bend in the river, a Russian patrol boat guided them into a dock and the military intelligence people were sent for. Papers were produced, examined, held up to the light--but they had already "confessed, " in the most public way imaginable, to the worst of their crimes: being part of a supply system that served an enemyf�tingforce. Thus the intelligence people found little to provoke their interest. They had the "crime, " which satisfied one of their instincts, and they had the "penalty, " which satisfied the other. The penalty was a form of conscription: these tugboats and their crews would serve the Occupation garrison, which desperately needed a way to get back and forth across the river. The retreating Germans had blown every single bridge in Budapest, whose twin cities, Budaand Pesth, were divided by the Danube. In return for faithful service, they would receive Red Army food rations, which amounted to a generous ladle, twice daily, from a cauldron into which all appropriated food was thrown. The stew boiled twenty-four hours a day, a fatty broth of onions, roosters, rabbits, dead horse, turnips--whatever they happened on in the course of their collecting forays--the Red Army essentially lived off the countryside. Vodka rations, supplied from the east, might come later, the Russian officers said, if they worked hard and kept their noses clean. The tugboat people found this an excellent arrangement. They had their lives and their boats, they would be fed, and they were keenly aware that captured enemies of the Soviet armies rarely fared that well. After a few hours, they were sent back to their boats and told to await further direction. Khristo was taken to a room. For him they had two captainswith the top buttons of their tunics undone. One was tall, with colorless eyes, the other short and not happy about it. So, they started in, he was a Yugoslav conscript worker who had escaped from his masters in Prague. A curious tale. How had he done it? Describe a milling machine, please. And what was the lubricating procedure for a lathe. Had he ever used a router plane in his work? Where was the factory? What did it do? Where did he live? What was his mother's maiden name? The street on which the factory was located--what did it look like? What was he paid? Had anyone helped him in his escape? How had he gotten from Prague to Bratislava? Transferred? Who had signed the order? The German supervisor? What was his name? What did he look like? The papers had been destroyed? How convenient. We know you're an American spy, they told him. One of the tugboat crewmen had suspected it, had told them he was carrying gold. Where was it? Where was the radio? Where were the maps? Make a clean breast, they said; all we want is for you to work for us, surely you see you would be too valuable to be shot. Come on, they said, all three of us are in the same profession, if we don't stick together the higher-ups will shaft us all, we know it, you know it, let's make an arrangement, let's make each other comfortable. Some of these bastards would poke your eyes out if we weren't protecting you. _Mongolians.1__ You're lucky it's us and not them. We understand your problems. No, no, he told them, you've got it all upside down. He was a member of the Yugoslavian Communist party--he'd destroyed the card ten minutes before the Germans got him or it would have been lights out for him. He was a worker. All he wanted was to go home, eat some real food if he could find it, see what his old girlfriend was up to. He'd repaired German aircraft at a factory in Prague. The production schedules were set weekly, based on an anticipated workload known to three foremen. The day before he left, an ME-i10wing had been trucked in with damage from small arms fire--the number on the wing was something like7705-12.The German security officer in the factory was called Bischau. Production norms were not being met. He had committed several acts of sabotage, using emery grit and other materials. The name of the Communist party secretary in Kralijevo, his hometown, was Webak, but he believed it to be an alias. German casualties were being barged down the river Nitra, then up the Danube to Austria. Flies for Yaschyeritsa, he thought. He spooned it into their mouths as they slapped him and kicked his shins. Something to write down. Names, numbers, addresses. He never met their eyes and made them work for every bit of it. Dried up several times, was driven back to the subject. At last, he began to bore them. He'd taken the edge off their appetites and seemed to them less and less like anything resembling a banquet. Would he, they wanted to know, just in case he should some day be allowed to return to Yugoslavia, keep in touch? Nothing formal. Just the odd observation on life and circumstance in his homeland. Such a request caught him entirely unaware. He blinked stupidly, paused for some time, mulling it over like a machinist's problem. Well, he told them, this was not anything he'd ever considered, but he could find little wrong with it. The fascists in Yugoslavia had nearly destroyed the country, they must in future be resisted. If he could help in such an effort, be of some value, he saw nothing wrong with it. Any patriotic Yugoslav would do no less--he was sure of that. Well, they said, they would see him again. And they let him go-He returned to the _Tisza__ and told Annikathe sad facts of life. "Too bad," she said sorrowfully, staring off into the darkness as though she could see her lucky gods heading downriver. "I am sorry," he said. They stood at the rail together. From the streets of the city they could hear drunken singing and shouting and the occasional shot fired. "Be grateful that you are alive, Annika,"she said to herself sternly, pulling her sweater tight against the night chill rising off the river. "What now?" she asked him. He nodded east and said, "One way or another." "You are a funny sort of an American, river boy, that speaks Bulgarian and Russian and God knows what else." "American?" "You run from the Germans and fool the Russians. What else could you be?" "Just a man going home." "Very well," she said, "I shall remember you so." They were together in silence for a time, he was reluctant to leave her. She patted him twice on the shoulder and went below-decks. When she returned, she handed him the Czech automatic that she had hidden for him, two tins of jam, a clasp knife, and a few ten-florin Hungarian coins. "You are kind, Annika,"he said. "For luck," she said. "You cannot give a knife without a coin." She leaned out over the bulwark and unknotted a kerchief that held the small fortune he had given her--they both knew she dared not keep it. "Farewell, my little friends," she said sadly. "Once upon a time you were a rich man's pride. You have made a great journey, but now you stink like old cheese, and the Russians will smell you out." One by one, at first, then all together, she let them fall from her open hand, gold coins lost in a river. He walked up a ramp onto the quay and made quickly for the side streets. He had intended to steal a rowboat and drift silently away from the city, but there wasn't an unguarded craft of any description that he could see--not with all the bridges down, there wasn't. So he walked south, making his way to within sight of the river from time to time to be sure he wasn't wandering off course. The city had apparently seen many weeks of street fighting. A few blocks were mounds of stone and dirt and splintered wood, but it took bombs or artillery to do that. Where he walked it was mostly buildingfa�espocked with mortar shells and sprinkled with the whitish chip marks of small arms fire. There was hardly an unshattered windowpane to be seen--glass crunched continually beneath his boots--and the clouds of flies and the smell of unburied bodies nauseated him. He clamped a hand over his mouth and nose and breathed against his own skin and that seemed to help a little. There were no Russian officers to be seen, just a few drunken troopers trying to make their way back to wherever they thought their units might be. At one point, a Mongolian corporal rushed out of a doorway and, embracing him with a clasp like iron, lifted him completely off the ground, put him down, and began singing wildly and dancing him around in a bear hug. The man was only an inch or two above five feet tall and his breath reeked of turpentine. Khristo danced along and sang at the top of his lungs--he knew _that when you are that drunk, everyone else had better be too--whooping and yowling like a lunatic. After they had sworn friendship for life and Khristo had gravely accepted the hand of his sister in marriage, the man went staggering away and disappeared into an alley. He spent the better part of the night reaching the outskirts of the city. When first dawn began to lighten the road, he wandered into a neighborhood of little shacks, crawled under a piece of tin sheeting at the back of a roofless house, and fell asleep. It took him four days to reach Yugoslavia. There was nothing moving downstream--no opportunity for stowaway or expropriation presented itself--so he walked, or L a road that meandered down the eastern ba. nk of the river for some hundred and ten miles. He had to guess the distance; only a few mile markers remained and some of those had been altered to deceive invading armies, but it was at least that far. He was not alone on the road. Small knots of refugees, old people, women and children, walked along with him or passed him going the other way, their possessions rolled in blankets on their backs or pushed along in handcarts or baby carriages. There seemed to be equal numbers of them headed in each direction, and this puzzled him. In his experience, refugees moved only in one direction: away from war. But this was different, he thought. This was something he had never seen before. In1940,when he'd fled from the German armies down clogged French roads, the air had been filled with wild rumors and the electricity of unfolding events. That had been a terrible time, but despite its sorrow and confusion there'd been a perverse ecstasy to it--the struggle of ordinary people, caught in the open by amoment of history, to survive. This was far worse. These people were the defeated, the uprooted; hopelessness and despair hung about them like smoke. They walked slowly, hypnotized by exhaustion, and their eyes never left the ground. He began to suspect, after a time, that the refugees on the road might not have a destination. Perhaps they had no papers or permits, perhaps when they tried to stay somewhere they were chased away. He did not know the reason, but the people walked without purpose, as though walking itself was now all they could do, and they meant to walk until they dropped or until some authority appeared and told them what was required of them. On the first day, he caught himself walking too quickly, with too much purpose. He cut a stick from an exploded tree and, after that, fell naturally into the appropriate limp. By the second day he was covered with a fine, gritty soil that blew in the wind, and he was tiring, and there was no longer any difficulty at all about blending in. He walked past empty villages where open shutters banged in the wind, past burnt-out farmhouses seen at a distance across fields of unplowed mud, past blackened tanks with guns pointing at the sky. At night he slept on the ground, waking damp and sore, and the brief flurries of rain meant that he never really dried out. He had started out in reasonably good shape. In Prague he had spent so much time on the move, hurrying from meeting to meeting, always behind schedule, that the walking of the first two days did not bother him overmuch. His shins ached where the Russians had kicked him, but that would pass, he knew, and he had unwrapped his hand to let the air heal the long, white blister that had formed on it. But he now began to comprehend what had happened to Voluta, how he had come to make the critical error that had nearly killed them both. To meet after curfew, in the open, at a guarded bridge, was a reasonable definition of suicide, an extraordinarily stupid mistake for a man who had spent his adult life in the shadows, for a man who crossed borders like the wind. Yet it had happened, and Khristo finally understood how it had happened. Moving across the countryside made one prey, over time, to a series of small mishaps, none of them serious inand of itself, but cumulative over time. A few hours of sleep when one could manage it, a meal now and then, the insidious chill of the early spring, the constant forcing of the mind into a state of vigilance when all one craved was numbness, when not to think about anything seemed the most exquisite luxury the world had to offer. He woke on the morning of the third day to find that he was soaked to the skin and the back of his throat was on fire. In panic, he forced himself to a sitting position, then swallowed obsessively until the burning subsided. He was thirsty, dry as dust. The only water available collected in shellholes or farmers' ponds or, in extremity, there was the river. But each time he had to drink he was in fear of cholera, so permitted himself only a few sips, imagining that his body would fight the bacteria better if it was limited to small doses. _An old wives' tale,__ he told himself. Yet something primitive within him insisted that it be done that way even if he knew better. The body runs on liquid, he thought, I must have it. _No,__ said another voice, _only a little.__ Out on the road, a small group of old people in black clothing was already on the move, though it was barely light. What did they eat? he wondered. He'd had a tin of jam the previous day. Had slid down an embankment onto the shore of the river, where he could hide in order to eat it. Like an animal with its kill, he thought. Plum jam. The most delicious thing there could possibly be. He'd sawn the tin open with his knife and spooned the jam up with his fingers. _Walk, __ he told himself to stop the reverie. _Walk and you will feel better. __ And there would be more jam tomorrow. Maybe the sun would come out and dry him off. Maybe the Americans would swoop down in one of their special planes--they seemed to have no end of them--and whisk him off to Switzerland, to Basel, to the Gasthaus Kogelmann. Where they served a thick pancake of fried potatoes and onions and, for those who took full board, Frau Kogelmann would make sure there was a second pancake for you if you were still hungry. When you drank some water, in the little dining area set off from the parlor, a boy came with a yellow pitcher and refilled your glass. You didn't have to ask. Of the fourth day he remembered little. The villages of Ercsi and Adony and Dunaf�arseemed deserted. He would wait at the outskirts for a group of refugees and walk through with them, so as to pass unnoticed. But he was not challenged. Russian military police sat in American Jeeps and smoked cigarettes, watching him limp past. At Fajsz, a woman came out of a house and gave him a cup of water. Her face beneath the black shawl was seamed and windburned, yet she was young and seemed very beautiful because there was pity for him in her eyes. He drank the water and handed the cup back."K�n�he said, his voice a dry whisper. She nodded in acknowledgment, then a voice called from a house and she went away. Some miles before the town of Moh�, he left the Great Plain and entered the swampland of southern Hungary. Now it was not so far to Yugoslavia. Soviet troops had been there longer, river traffic would be closer to normal. It was a guess--information abstracted from Czech newspapers by Hlava and reported to him twice a week--but a reasonable guess. The German censors did not want the population to know where the lines were, but they could not resist reporting Russian atrocities against civilians--an attempt to stiffen public resistance as the time of invasion approached. Good guess or not, he would have to find a way to get back on the river, he could not walk much farther. The hunger had stopped gnawing at him, but his mind was running in odd channels, wandering through images of the past. There was no sense to them; they were simply moments of other days, things heard or seen with no reason to be remembered. He would, from time to time, snap awake, recall who he was and what he was doing, but then he would drift away once more. A woman in Fajsz had given him a cup of water. Or had she? Had that happened? At one point, somewhere south of Moh�, he came to his senses to discover that he was on his knees by the river, water cupped in his hands. There were black specks floating on the surface. He bent his head and sipped at it, but it was foul with dead fish and the taste of metal and he spit it out. "Serves you right." Startled, he scrambled to his feet. The voice came from a smallskiff not twenty feet away, its bow partly grounded on the sand. A man in the uniform of a Russian enlisted soldier was watching him intently. Then he realized, through a mist, that the man had spoken in Serbian, a Yugoslav language close enough to Bulgarian that he understood it easily. Had he left Hungary? Contrived to walk blindly through a frontier post? "Here," the man said, "try this." He held out a canteen, the flat kind used by the Red Army, its canvas cover dripping from being hung over the stern of the boat in order to keep the water cool. He waded over to the boat, accepted the canteen and took a brief drink. The water was cold and sweet. Handing it back, he saw that the man was wearing several ranks of medals on his jacket. He was young, nineteen or twenty, with service cap pushed back on his head to reveal hair chopped short in military fashion. The bottoms of his trousers were tied in knots just below the knees and a pair of homemade crutches was resting on the bow seat, their tops cushioned with folded rags. The man waved off the canteen. "Go ahead," he said. Khristo drank more water, rubbed his lips with his fingers, and returned the canteen. "Thank you," he said, using the Bulgarian expression. "Bulgarian?" "Yes," he said. "Where are you going?" "Home," Khristo said. "Downriver from here. Near Silistra." "Can you row a boat?" He nodded that he could. "Come on then," the man said. Khristo climbed carefully over the side, balancing his weight so he would not rock the boat. The soldier changed seats, moving to the bow by using his hands to shift himself along the gunwales. Khristo took the oars--facing the "wrong" way, downstream, a river tradition that allowed the oarsman to keep an eye out for obstacles--and rowed out to midriver, his hands rolling over each other, oar blades chopping up and down in the water. "Good," the soldier said appreciatively. "I see you've done this before." "Oh yes," Khristo said. "Just as well. It's a bastard out here--you'll break your back trying to keep this bugger pointed downstream." "We have the current," Khristo said, thankful he didn't have to put his back into it. "More like it has us. You'U see." He twisted around and watched the river for a few moments, then turned back to Khristo. "I'm Andrej,"he said. They shook hands. "I'm called Nikko." He rowed for several hours as the rain sprinkled on and off.Andrejspoke casually of his time in the army. His father had been a great admirer of the Bolsheviks and had sent him off to enlist with the Russians in1940.He had fought at Stalingrad as a machine-gunner, then come west with the Second Ukrainian Front, seeing action at the forcing of the river Prut and fighting through the Oituz Pass in the Carpathians. Wounded in the back by mortar shrapnel, he had served with a second-rank unit as far as the town of Szarvas, in eastern Hungary, where he'd stepped on a German land mine and lost the lower parts of both legs. He was philosophical about it. "At least they didn't get anything important," he said with a wink. After a time in a field hospital, he'd taken off on "night leave" and caught a ride to Budapest. Nobody there wanted to hear about his problems--a harassed clerk took a moment to stamp his mustering-out papers--so he "borrowed" a skiff from a drunken guard and headed toward home, a little town to the east of Belgrade. They crossed into Yugoslavia late in the afternoon and a Yugoslav patrol boat came alongside to take a look at them. Andrejtossed a salute, then waved his crutches. A sailor returned the salute from the foredeck while Khristo waved and smiled. "Home,"Andrejsaid. "Your Russian uniform," Khristo said. "They don't seem to mind." "Why should they? We are allies. Tito will be running things down here and we'll be much better off. You'll see when you get home to Bulgaria. The Russians bring us peace." Khristo nodded polite agreement. "No more politics and feuding." "That's it,"Andrejsaid vigorously. "Everything nice and quiet, a man will be able to get on with his life." The tempo of the river was steady and constant and, after a time, Andrej's head lowered to his chest, his body rocking gently with the motion of the skiff as he dozed. Khristo rowed on, riding the current, working the oars as rudders to keep the prow pointed east. It required all his attention, and the repetition of effort soon crept into the muscles between his shoulders and resolved into a sharp, persistent ache. It was hard labor--Andrejhad been right about that--the spring flood toyed with the skiff, tried to spin it in eddies or knock it sideways with a quartering swell, but Khristo used the force of the water to his advantage. He knew the techniques in his bones, having learnt the job as a child. And he had gained strength when Andrejhad shared white cheese and bread with him. He was astonished at what a little food could do for a man. In the skiff, he was much closer to the water than he had been on the _Tisza,__ and he could see the war coming down the river--a gray sludge that floated on the surface, smashed tree trunks, dead birds, the tangled remnants of a feather mattress, a strip of German camouflage cloth wound around the end of a stick. What could that have been, he wondered. The barge was close to the point where the Drava entered the Danube, near the town of Osijek, on the inside of a tight curve to the north. In the fading light he could see that it was a very old barge, half sunk in the water, half settled into the mud of the shoreline. There were white gouges in the wood at the stern--it was obviously something of a hazard to navigation, abandoned there long ago and never removed. An old man was sitting on the stern, fishing with a line on a pole and smoking a pipe. The barge's former markings were still visible, whitewashed numerals that appeared to have faded into the rotted hull over time.??825. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again it was still there. Someone had reached out for him. He took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. Resisted the urge to leap out of the boat then and there and swim wildly toward the barge. In the bow, Andrejdozed on. He should be killed, Khristo thought. Because whatever cover story might be contrived at this point was going to be so thin that a light would shine through it. This close, the Czech automatic would do the job, and one more pistol shot on this river wasn't going to make a difference to anybody. But he hadn't the heart for it. The soldier's life had been spared in battle, he did not deserve to be shot dead in his sleep a few score miles from home. Khristo waited until the barge was out of sight, scooped some water onto his face, then shipped oars. Andrejwoke up immediately. They were rotating slowly in the current, drifting toward the rocky profile of the near bank. "Can't do it," Khristo said sorrowfully, breathing hard, wiping his face. "Just can't do it."�������������������������������������� The soldier rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "What?" he said. "I tried," Khristo said, and by way of explanation extended his blistered hand. "You can manage,"Andrejsaid. "I saw you." Khristo shook his head apologetically. "Very well," the soldier said, his expression resolute and cheerful. "I shall take over the oars for an hour, then we'll pull in for the night. That will fix you up, you'll see, by the morning you'll have your strength back." "No," Khristo said. "It's best that I go on by foot, out on the roads." "Nonsense. Stand up and we'll trade places. Keep a lookout in the bow for your share of the work." "I cannot allow it," Khristo said, putting the oars back in the water and guiding the skiff into the near bank, making a great show of hauling at the water. "Don't be a proud fool,"Andrejsaid. "We must all work together now, remember, and take up the slack where we are able. I am able." "Rowed halfway home by a legless man? Not me." The bow skidded into the mud and Khristo hopped out, then pushed the boat back out into the water. The soldier worked his way down the gunwales to the rowing seat. "To hell with you, then," he said bitterly, rowing the skifftoward the middle of the river, chopping angrily at the water with his oars. By the time Khristo worked his way back through the underbrush along the shore, the old man had lit a lantern. He clambered up on the barge and called out a greeting. The old man nodded in response, not bothering to turn around. "Any luck?" Khristo asked. "No," the old man said, "not much." "Too bad." "Yes. There used to be pike here." "The markings on this barge--I used to have a friend whose boat had the same numerals. Quite a coincidence, no?" The old man nodded that it was. "I'd like to see him again, this friend," Khristo said. "Then I'll take you there," the old man said. He stood slowly, taking the line from the river and wiping the muck from it with thumb and forefinger, then kicked an old piece of canvas aside and, with his other hand, retrieved a Browning Automatic Rifle, the American BAR, much battered and obviously well used. "Your friend is my son," he said, shouldering the heavy weapon, gripping it so that his finger was within the trigger guard. "You carry the lantern," he said, "and go on ahead of me, so that he may have the pleasure of seeing his old friend arrive." They walked for a long time, climbing into an evergreen forest where the sharp smell of pine pitch hung in the evening air. This was the land called Syrmia, lying between the rivers Danube and Sava, the edge of the Slavonian mountain range that ran north into the Carpathians. The trail reminded Khristo of Cambras--a steep, winding approach with potential for ambush at every blind turn. His lantern sometimes showed him a gleam of reflected light at the edges of the path. Weapons, he thought. But these sentries did not challenge him or show themselves, simply passed him on silently, one to the next. After an hour of hard climbing, the old man melted away and Khristo was alone in a clearing. He stood there patiently while, somewhere, a decision was made. Above him, an ancient fortress of weathered stone was built directly into the face of the mountain. There were hill forts scattered all across northern Yugoslavia, he knew, some of the sites already in use at the time of the Greeks and Romans and, the story went, never vacant for one day in all those centuries. From the top of the hill, the river would be visible for miles in both directions once daylight came. At last, a silhouette moved toward him from the darkness, a man who walked with great difficulty, his weight shifting violently with every step. Khristo raised his lantern so that his face could be seen and the man advanced into the circle of its light. Perhaps it was Drazen Kulic, he thought, or perhaps not. This man wore the blue jacket of a Yugoslavian army officer over a torn black sweater. He walked with the aid of a stick in his right hand, his left arm dangling useless by his side, the hand cupped and dead. A black patch covered his left eye, and the skin on that side of his face was ridged and puckered all the way to the jawline, pulling the corner of his mouth into an ironic half smile. The man stared at him for a time, searching his face, then said, "Welcome to my house." "Drazen Kulic," he answered formally, "I am honored to be your guest." They walked together through a pair of massive doors made of logs cross-braced with iron forgings, into a cavelike room with a fire that vented through a blackened hole in the ceiling. There were some thirty people in the room, half of them sprawled asleep in the shadows, the other half occupied with a variety of chores: loading belts and magazines, cleaning weapons, repairing kit and uniform. They spoke in low voices, merely glanced at him, and ignored him after that. The women had bound their hair in scarves and wore sweaters and heavy skirts, while the men were dressed in remnants of army uniforms. The room smelled of unwashed bodies and charred wood and the fragrant odor of gun oil. The sound of working bolts, metal on metal, formed a rhythmic undertone as the guns were reassembled after cleaning. Kulic took him to a tresde table set against one wall, and an old woman appeared with two tin cans made over into cups and filled with home-brewed beer, a bowl of salt cabbage and a slab of cornmeal bread. Khristo used his knife to put pieces of cabbage on the bread. Kulic raised his beer. "Long life," he said. Khristo drank. The taste was bitter and very good. "Long life," he repeated. "And thanks to God for letting me see the signal on the barge. I could have missed it." The right side of Kulic's mouth twisted up in a brief smile. "You have not changed, I see," he said, "forever fretting over details." He paused to drink. "At that bend in the river there is a cross-current, and if you do not see the barge you will hit it--though I take nodiing away from God, as you can see." "How did it happen?" "A mortar shell, in a graveyard in the Guadarrama, the mountains west of Madrid. I'd been a bad boy, and the NKVD 'arranged' for it to happen. They meant for me to die, but I was only--well, you can see for yourself." "I'd heard that you were captured. Also that the Russians got you out." "Who told you that?" Kulic asked. "Uya Goldman." "Ilya!" "Yes. Years ago, you understand. In Paris, before the war." Kulic took two cigarettes from the pocket of his uniform jacket, gave one to Khristo, struck a wooden match on the table, and lit them both. "In Paris, before the war," he repeated, a sigh in his voice. He did not speak for a time, then said, "It's true. They did get me out. If I'd died they wouldn't have cared, but I was alive and I knew too much, so they couldn't leave me where I was. Then, after they'd sprung me, they tried to send me back to Moscow, but I vanished." "Have you made it right with them?" Kulic shook his head _no,__ exhaling smoke from his nostrils. "Bastards," he said briefly. "Do you know what went on here, in Yugoslavia?" "Some," Khristo said. "Communists fighting Ghetnik fascists, centrists, monarchists, the Mihailovich units, and all of us, excepting the Chetniks, fighting the Germans. Some groups with OSS support, some with the British MI6, some with the Russians. Believe me, it is beyond imagining. We shot our wounded, Khristo, to keep them from the Gestapo./did that, with my own hand, sometimes to friends I'd played with as a child." "This war..."Khristo said. "This war was worth what was done only if we come out of it a nation. Forgive the speech, but it's true. When the Russians got here in force we'd already taken control--they could not do to us what they did to the Poles. But for that we paid a price." "I know," Khristo said. "I saw it in France." "This was worse," Kulic said simply. They were silent for a time. The sounds of the great room--the hiss of damp wood on fire, the cleaning of weapons, subdued conversation--flowed around them. "And now," Kulic said finally, "it begins again. Only this time we are alone, or soon will be, and the NKVD begins to nibble. Assassinations, kidnappings, false rumors, the press manipulated, officials bribed, the destruction of reputations--you know their methods, I'll spare you the bedtime stories--but there is no misreading their intentions. They want Tito for a puppet. If they can't have him, they'll throw him out a window and try someone else. Meanwhile, our American friends are still here, and they help if they can, but they are about to fold up their tents and steal away into the night." "I doubt that," Khristo said. "You'll see." "Drazen," Khristo said after a moment, "the numbers on the barge." "Still a mystery?" Kulic smiled with the right side of his mouth. Khristo waited. "I believe you sent a radio message to the Baristation. Some strange ravings about an NKVD colonel who is supposed to materialize in Sfintu Gheorghe on the twelfth of April. Well, you wanted a contact, now you have it." "You are to help?" Khristo leaned forward, a little amazed. "Help." Kulic repeated the word to himself and laughed. "How is your English?" "Good enough." "I believe it went: _'Find out what that crazy son-of-htch does.'__ You understand?" "Yes." "Well." Khristo took a moment to assemble his thoughts. _"What he does__is bring Sascha Vonets out of Romania, with information, probably very good information. Ilya got Sascha's message out--from the camps. Volutadelivered it to me. It cost him his life. In Spain, Saschatold me what was coming--in the _Yezhovschina__ purge of the security services--and Ilya warned me when I had to get out. Then, in Paris, I was trapped by the British, in an�gr�eration against the Soviets, and sent to prison. For life. Voluta's organization set me free, just before the Germans took Paris. So, because of these people, because they endangered themselves on my behalf, I sit here drinking beer with you. One could simply walk away from such responsibilities. Is that your suggestion? "These friends... are all NKVD friends." "And you, Drazen." "Perhaps someone wonders just what really goes on with you, where your heart is. You walked away from the Russians in1936.Or maybe not." "Horseshit," Khristo said. "Yes? Could be. All apologies, and so forth, but explain to me why you are not the bait in an NKVD trap? You go up into that godforsaken Bessarabia--some little fishing village, a place beyond the end of the world. Romania now belongs to the Russians, so what you are trying to do is draw OSS operatives onto Soviet-occupied soil. Where they will be gobbled up and put on show. Somehow, heaven only knows how, American newspapers learn of this. 'Oh-ho!' they say. 'This bunch of wild asses in the OSS now spies on our great ally in the war. Off with their heads!'" Khristo stood up. There was silence in the room. "Sit down, sit down," Kulic said, making calming motions with his hand. The old woman returned and poured beer into his tin can from a pitcher. "Very well," he went on, "you are a virgin." Khristo sat down on the bench. His hands were shaking so he put them between his knees. Kulic leaned forward and spoke very quietly. "It is politics. The American government is going to shut down the OSS. The minute the Axis surrender is final--that's the end of it. Some sections will be moved around to other departments, some of the networks will be salvaged, but..." "And so?" "So there is no guarantee, even if you should manage to slipthrough the Russian nets on this river, that there will be anybody to help you in Romania." "Even if you tell them that I am not a traitor?" "Even then. You could be unknowing, no sort of traitor at all, yet still bait. You've seen such operations." Khristo was silent. It had happened in Paris: he had been drawn into a scheme to stir up the Soviet intelligenceapparatin Western Europe, and he had never known about it until too late, until Aleksandra was gone. Kulic's expression changed. There was suddenly discomfort in his face, regret, as though he had determined to do something that he did not want to do, but that he knew he had to do. "Khristo Nicolaievich," he said quietly, "you are my old friend. I know your heart. But we are both part of something that is larger than two individuals and sometimes, in war, individuals cannot matter. There are times when a sacrifice has to be made. But, for one time, maybe we should try to let friendship win. Let us take you south, through the mountains. We'll put you on a boat, give you a passport of some kind, and leave you in Trieste. It's not a bad place, you can live there if you like. Or go to Paris and drive a cab. Live your life, stop fighting, have your politics over a coffee if you must have them, but for God's sake do not delude yourself about Americans. They change, Khristo. One minute they are excited, the next cool. What point is there in having two useless corpses in Sfintu Gheorghe instead of one? They may decide to leave you sitting there like a fool, untrusted, a provocateur for the Soviets, and such a thing would be too sad for an old friend to see. I will get you down the river, if you feel you must go, but my heart tells me that tragedy is waiting for you there." Khristo lay on a blanket in the corner of the room but he was too cold to sleep. From time to time someone got up and fed the fire and he stared into the flames and wondered what to do. Lying next to him was a girl, perhaps seventeen, with a blanket pulled over her head like a shawl. Awake, she would be soft and pretty, he knew, but in sleep her face was aged and frightened. Her eyelids flickered, then her lips moved as though she were speaking in a dream. He was so cold. He had lived a cold, wasted life, he thought. Blown about in storms from Vidin to Moscow to Spain and then Paris. Sant�ison had put an end to that, a white blank in his life. And what was the point? To end up dead in some little Bessara-bian village? Was that why he had been put on this earth? The end of the war was coming; it would be like a dawn, the living would sigh with relief and set about to change the world. He wanted to see it. He wanted to live. It would be the best of times to start a new life. _Trieste.__ A part of Aleksandra's fantasy. Something about the place had always intrigued her. Perhaps she had been right. In Trieste, he knew, there were Slavs and Italians living side by side--he would not have to be an�gr�analien, he could just be a man. Looking into the fire, he could see it. Little streets with radios playing behind shuttered windows, bakeries, dogs napping in the sun. He could walk beside the Adriatic with a newspaper folded beneath his arm. He could stop ata caf�d read the news. About the mayor and his deputies and the scandal over the contract for the repair of the local streets. Out at sea, a freighter would move slowly across the horizon. The girl sleeping beside him mumbled some words and, for a moment, her face was touched by sorrow. In the morning it was raining and wisps of fog hung in the tops of the pine trees. Someone gave him a cup of hot water flavored with tea and he felt much better after he'd drunk it. Then Kulic took him some way up the mountain--they had to walk very slowly, and Khristo helped him in the difficult places--to an open meadow, a sloping field with mist lying above the long grass and a row of wooden boards set in the ground. One of them wasmarked _Aleksandra__--_�943-__ Khristo stood with his hands in his pockets, his face wet in the rain. "She came down here in'37,"Kulic said. "When Ilya got her released, he bought her a ticket and put her on a train. He sent along a letter. 'Keep her out of sight,' he said. 'Encourage her to live quietly.' She did just that. Stayed in a village and worked in a shop, kept to herself. She was someone whose fire had gone out, though you could see, every now and then, how she'd been. But she seemed to have promised herself to be that way no more,to make the world pay for what it had done to her by withholding her light from it. Then we were invaded and went to war. In the strange way of things, it brought her back to life. She fought with us, first as a courier, then with a rifle. We took a German supply column in October of1943--mules with mortar rounds strapped to them. And when the thing was finished we found her curled up behind a tree and she was gone. The magazine of her rifle was empty, Khristo, she bore her share of it and more. "While she was with us, she used the cover identity that Goldman had provided for her. But then, as the war went on, she began to call herself Aleksandra. So, when we brought her up here, we marked her grave with that name only, as we believed she would have wished. From Ilya, I knew her story, but she never spoke of you, or of Paris, but neither did she take a lover." "Thank you for bringing me here," Khristo said. "I spoke to you from the heart last night, about Trieste, but I could not let you go away without seeing this. It is another side of things, something between you and me, only that." "It's better for me that I found out," he said. "There are meadow flowers this time of year," Kulic said. "I'll wait for you if you like." Three days later, he went east on the river. Kulic found him a berth on a tug called the Bromo,bound for Belgrade to pick up a bargeload of iron pipe destined for the rebuilding of the transfer station at Galati, in Romania, the final staging point for oil going to Soviet Black Sea ports. Obtaining export stamps for the pipe had been, according to the pilot of the _Brovno,__ "like a fire in a whorehouse--everybody running around in circles and screaming at everybody else." The city of Belgrade had been virtually leveled by the Wehrmacht,and whatever pipe they did manage to fabricate was, they felt, better used to supply water for Yugoslavian toilets rather than fuel for Soviet tanks. And as for the Romanian state trading company, which had to be pounded on the back until it coughed up the _import__ papers, well, that was even worse. A fire in a whorehouse on a Friday night. "All spies up there," the pilot said. "Romanians." For Khristo, there was little to do aboard the _Brovno.__Ivo,thepilot, stayed in the wheelhouse while his brother-in-law, Josip, ran the engine down below and his son, called Marek, served as second engineer. The _Brovno__ was a big, powerful river tug, built just before the war. They'd run her up an inlet in1940,built a shack around her, dismantled thedieselengine and hidden the parts in three separate attics, then gone off to the hills to fight the Germans. Khristo spent most of his time leaning on a railing and watching the land go by. Kulic had taken him off to the Osijek town hall and obtained, using forged identification papers, a Yugoslav work permit as a deckhand. So he was officially part of the _Brovno's__ crew, but the captain wanted no part of him as a worker. "What do you want me to do?" he asked as they got under way at dawn. Ivothought for a time. "Coil a rope," he said. "And then?" Ivoshrugged. "Put it in the rope locker, if you like." He did neither. The river was taking him home, and he wanted to stand at the railing and gaze at the countryside. The hundred and twenty miles from Osijek down to Belgrade passed quickly, and by nightfall they'd pulled into the river Sava and tied up while Ivowent off to the dockside office of the harbormaster. He was gone for a long time. When he returned, he rang for three-quarter power and nosed the _Brovno__ through a forest of tugs and barges with such speed that their wake drew curses all across the harbor. "What did they say?" Khristo asked. "He said he'd throw me in the river. I said I'd throw him in the river. Then he signed over the barge." "That took three hours?" "We said it many different ways." They located the pipe-laden barge and tied up to it, positioning themselves at a point just forward of the stern on the starboard quarter, then, at Ivo's direction, resecured the load, tightening the cables down with a Stillson wrench. It was after midnight by the time they pushed the barge out of the Sava and back onto the Danube, turning east by north into the foothills of the Carpathians. How you came across the Hungarian plain, and then into the Serbian mountains, on a river that ran downhill, Khristo had never really understood, but the mountain shapes rose bulky anddark on either side of the river and the air grew sharp as they moved through the night. Ivonavigated by the beam of a powerful searchlight that swept the river ahead of him, revealing shoals and sandbars where the water foamed white. Somewhere past the giant fort at Smederevo, the light fell upon a pair of bodies, a man and a woman, joined together at the wrist by rope or wire, shifting slowly downriver on the current. "Collaborators,"Ivosaid, his cigarette glowing red in the darkened pilothouse. Khristo slept for a time, after Marek relieved Ivoat the helm, swaying in a hammock in the crew cabin, waking at dawn to a moment of panic as he tried to remember where he was. On deck, he saw that the _Brovno__ had tied up to a small dock, for customs and passport stamps and to take on a Romanian pilot, a small man in a suit and tie. "For the Iron Gate," Marek explained. "Who is this?" the Romanian said, staring at Khristo. "Deckhand," Marek answered, winking at Khristo above the man's head. Taking the hint, he went off and coiled a rope in the stern. Ivo, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, appeared and took the helm, and they were off at slow speed through the Kazan pass into Romania. It was the strangest piece of river he'd ever seen, sculptured columns of rock thrust up in midstream and the mountains closed in like high walls. There were sudden dips and falls in the river, and the _Brovno__ and its barge plunged and bucked past rocky outcrops that looked close enough to touch and echoed back the throb of the pistons above the water. As morning came, the passage filled with strange light. He kneeled in the stern, a piece of tarry rope forgotten in his hands, and watched a line of sunlight crawl up the slope of a mountain, turning the mass of dark shapes into a forest of evergreen trees, their branches hanging with the weight of morning rain, droplets glittering as the sun caught them. The Bulgarian border station was a sagging dock at the mouth of the river Timok. Two army captains came on board and sat at a table in the crew cabin. Glasses and brandy were produced. One of the captains was dark-skinned and wore a thick mustache, the other was fair-skinned, with black hair and blue eyes. Whenthey had finished their brandy, Khristo and Marek were brought in together to have their papers stamped. The pale captain looked at him curiously. "He's new," he said. "Yes,"Ivosaid, "a hard worker. My sister's boy." The man glanced down at the Yugoslav papers, then back up at Khristo. "He looks like a Bulgarian," he said. "Who'd your sister marry?" Ivoshook his head. "Do not ask," he said, voice filled with mock sorrow. They laughed together. The captain stamped his papers. "Good luck to you," he said, using an old-fashioned Bulgarian idiom. Khristo smiled uncertainly and nodded his way out of the crew cabin. Under way once more, they drew close to Vidin, and when the river turned south at the chalk cliff hollowed out by curving water, he was home. They chugged past the shacks by the river with grapevines that looped over the reed roofs, the pole-built docks, the minarets, and the Turkish fortress on the beach. He stood like a sailor, leaning on his elbows, one foot hooked in the lowest rail, and a woman in black waved from the shore. He waved back. Then the town receded in the distance, a small place lit by a weak April sun, the river turned east again, and it was gone. The days and nights blended together on the river, it was as though the rules of ordinary life were suspended and hours no longer mattered. There were high guard towers on the Romanian shore--sometimes the glint of binoculars--and twice they were boarded from patrol boats and searched. But there was nothing to be discovered, only some Yugoslav river sailors and a load of iron pipe on a barge. Europe was lost behind them--after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea. At Silistra, the _Brovno__ left Bulgarian territory and moved north toward the Romanian delta. A day later, they crossed the southern boundary of the strange land known as Bessarabia. Officially it was Romanian territory, called Moldavian Romania, lying south of the Ukrainian SSR, which was part of Russia. But the name Bessarabia was older than the official borders, and it had always been a lost place, home to ancient Russian religious sects expelledfrom the interior, home to Jews and Turks and Gypsies and Tatars and tribes so lost they no longer had any name at all. It was a place for people that nobody else wanted. The spring wind blew hard from the west and the sky shifted gray and white and blue above them. Along the shore, birch and poplar groves were leafing out, softening the empty fields that ran to the horizon and vanished in the distant hills. At dawn, herons worked at fishing in the shallows. Khristo felt he was sailing on the edge of the world, east of the Balkans. At dusk, the mountains of Transylvania were silhouettes, backlit by the setting sun, and where the land fell away from the river he could see lakes that turned violet as night came on and great clouds of birds that rose from the shore and wheeled across the evening sky. The nights were black, with not a single light to be seen. Late one night they saw a bonfire on an island, with human shapes dancing slowly before it. Ivoshut the engines down but there was no music to be heard, only the sounds of insects and water sweeping by the hull and a deep silence.

In April of1945,in Palestine, Jewish refugees arriving by freighter from Cyprus came first to the northern port of Haifa, where diey sat on benches in a large shed and waited to be processed. They were called by number, and each held tightly to a worn scrap of paper and waited, patiently or impatiently, to see one of several men and women who sat at old school desks facing the benches. They came from everywhere--from Jelgava in Latvia, from Wilno in Poland, from Strasbourg in France--everywhere. They had survived Hitler in a number of ways. Some had spent years in an attic or a cellar--having never seen the sun for all that time. Others had lived in the forests like animals. Still others had hidden themselves by the use of deception--assuming non-Jewish identities, sometimes resorting to blackmail or bribery of officials to ensure that identity checks confirmed their false papers. It was hot under the metal roof of the shed and there were flies, and the people waiting on the benches were exhausted. Heshel Zavi tried to be kind, to be patient, but he was not young anymore and these were difficult people, suspicious, often hostile. Theyhad saved their lives, a miracle. They had reached Palestine, another miracle. They had dreamed of oranges and joyous rabbis. Now they were confronted with Heshel Zavi, an old man with a short temper who had to ask them questions and write things down on paper. To the people on the benches, those who sat behind desks and wrote things on paper were enemies. Heshel Zavi didn't look much like an enemy--he was a burly old man in an open-neck shirt with a yarmulke set precariously atop stiff, wooly curls--but some of their other enemies had not looked like enemies either. _Well,__ he thought, _it's to be expected.__ He glanced at the chalkboard in the corner and saw that the next number was183.He called it out in Hebrew. There was no answer. Too much to hope for, he thought. He grumbled to himself and tried it in Yiddish. Again, no answer. What next, Polish? Russian? He tried Russian. _Ah-hah,__ he said to himself. This one was youngish, with a week's growth of stubble on his face. He wore the long overcoat and the traditional hat and shuffled to the desk, shoulders stooped, eyes lowered, much the usual thing, yet Heshel Zavi was not so sure. This one looked like a _yeshiva__b�, adedicated student of the Torah, yet there was more to him than that. He had small, clever features, there was something of the rat in him. Not quite a bad rat--Heshel Zavi amended his impression--a good rat, a wise rat, a rat in a children's story. But not a mouse. Definitely not a mouse. "Sit down," he said brusquely. "Welcome to Palestine. You will see me, then a doctor if you need one, representatives of the _kibbutzim,__ and so forth. We are here to help you, please be patient with us. Do you understand?" The man nodded that he understood. "Very well. Your name?" "Itzhak Gold." "Your name truly?" "Not really." "Never mind. We don't care. Itzhak Gold it is. From where?" "Kurland." "I'll write Lithuania." "If you like." "From a village?" "The city of Kaunas." "Very well. I'll write Kaunas. Next, occupation." "Clerk." Heshel Zavi wrote the word in Hebrew. Another clerk, he thought, just what they needed. He glanced at the man's hands, uncallused and soft. Well, they would fix that. "You would, no doubt, like to be a clerk in Palestine." The man shrugged, as though to say he knew nothing else. "It's farmers we need," Heshel Zavi said. "Someone who can fix a tractor. Clerks we have." Again the man shrugged. "Perhaps there is a civil service." "Like me, you mean?" Amazing how many of them wanted _his__ job--two hours in the country and they were ready to shove him aside. "No, not exactly like you. You have a small defense force, I believe." "There are several, all with grand names. Night watchmen is what they are." "Ah," said the man, his small, ratlike face lighting up with a smile, "the very thing for me." "You're sure? You can always change your mind. You _will__ change your mind--that's mostly what we do here, we are preoccupied with it. People who have not been able to change their minds for two thousand years tend to make up for lost time once they have the opportunity. As for being a night watchman, well, there's not much future in that, is there." "A litde, maybe. Where there are night watchmen, there will soon be someone to suggest what they should watch at night." Nimble, Heshel Zavi thought, and ambitious. He found himself liking the man, soft hands or not. He leaned forward across the desk. "Look," he said, "if you can bear waiting a little longer, maybe I have a friend who might help you. But it will take time. I have you to finish, and many others." "I don't mind at all," the man said. "I'll wait."

The people of Sfintu Gheorghe would never forget the events of April1945.The stories were told again and again--never thesame way twice, of course, everybody had their own version of it, depending on where they'd been and what they'd seen and what they wished they'd seen. They weren't liars, exactly, they just liked to make a good story better. Who can blame them? After all, Sfintu Gheorghe wasn't much of a place. In the old days, five centuries earlier, it had been a port of call for Genoese traders, but now it was just a fishing village, a few hundred souls perched out on an arm of the Dun�athat reached to the sea. They were of Greek origin, descendants of the Phanariot Greeks who had once served as the bureaucracy of Turkish and Boyarrule. Those days were gone, of course, now they were simply fishermen who took their boats out on the Black Sea. The sea _was__ black, a curiosity of nature, teeming with life just below the surface, then, fifty fathoms down, a dead place with a bizarre chemistry of water. The normal oxygen had, in some ancient time, been replaced by poisonous hydrogen sulfide and nothing could live in it. So whatever died in the surface waters drifted down to the lower depths where, because there was no oxygen, it did not decompose. Think of it, they would tell the rare visitor. Sailors, great fishes, boats, sea monsters--it was all still down there. They had a slightly peculiar vision of life in Sfintu Gheorghe, but that served them well during the second week in April because peculiar things went on. First, there was the madman. There were those who claimed the whole business started right there. Others disagreed. The Fortunate One, they'd say; the madman had nothing to do with it, he just happened to be around when the Fortunate One made his grandiose gesture. Nobody, however, denied that the madman had been there first, showing up on the tenth of April and hiding in the church. Hidingreally wasn't the word for it. Everyone knew he was there. A fellow with a bald head and a scraggy beard, clutching a piece of burlap that held a sheaf of soiled paper. Well, they thought, since the war some very odd people had shown up in the village, the madman was just one more, and he didn't bother anybody. He spent his days in the tiny loft inside the onion dome atop the church, coming out at night to relieve himself. The priest would leave him a little something to eat, and they all waited to see what he would do. A few of them had hidden up there themselves, when some dangerous person from the government came looking for them--it was the official village hiding place, and the madman, for the moment, was welcome to it. Then, on the morning of April12,the magnificent gift was made to appear--as though by sorcery. A fisherman discovered it on the beach, crossed himself, prayed to God, then ran like the devil to spread the news. He brought with him the note he found, and read it aloud as people gathered to see what was going on: To the Good People of Sfintu Gheorghe, Greetings and God's Blessing. For those who sheltered a man when he was cold, who fed him when he hungered, and who consoled him in the darkest hour of his life, a gift of appreciation. He signed himself _The Fortunate One.__ Who was that? Many candidates were suggested--the villagers combed their memories for lost travelers or storm-beached sailors that they'd helped--but no one of them was considered a certainty. His gesture, on the other hand, could easily enough be explained. The wicker hampers came from Istanbul, almost due south of them on the Black-Sea, and they were clearly marked with an address in Turkish--a certain shop on a certain street, obviously the grandest of places. This man, whoever he might be, had been helped by the village--nursed back to health, some said--then traveled on to Istanbul, where he had made his fortune. Now, later in life, he had determined to make peace with his memories and acted lavishly to repay an old kindness. He must be, they decided, a very fortunate one indeed, for there were twenty hampers. Half the village gathered around them as their contents were revealed. Fresh hams. Purple grapes. Tomatoes. Squash. Even eggplant, the most treasured vegetable of all Romanians. Pears. Peaches. And Spanish champagne--at least thirty cases of it. How, someone asked, could you even _have__ an eggplant in April? Where did these things come from? Not from any farmer they'd ever heard of. _Grown in a glass house,__ others said, shaking their fingers up and down as though they'd been burned--the universal sign language meaning _very expensive.__ It was all perishable, would have to beeaten that very night, so preparations for a great feast were immediately undertaken. There was, in the otherwise joyous proceedings, one sour note. Sometime on the afternoon of the twelfth a few Bucharest types, tough guys in city clothes, showed up at Sfintu Gheorghe accompanied by a big, nasty-looking Russian in a leather coat, with his hair sheared off so you could see the big nasty bulge at the back of his skull. They were looking for the madman, though they weren't very specific about it. This threatened to put a severe damper on matters, for if they took the madman they would also, clearly, take those who had aided him. But the people of Sfintu Gheorghe had not survived the horrendous regimes of their country for nothing. The city types weren't going to be a problem--their eyes lit up when they saw the bounty and they immediately went to work on the peaches. The Russian was another matter. He was the sourest thing they'd ever seen, so they determined to sweeten him up in a very traditional way. A couple of dark little girls with black eyes took him off somewhere and fucked him senseless. To begin with, they teased him into drinking a bottle of champagne which, instead of slamming a lid down on his feelings or making him explode like a bomb, as the vodka tended to do, rendered him giddily lightheaded and merry as a goat. He took a little black-haired girl under each arm and vanished in a swirl of giggles and wasn't seen again for two days, at which time he was discovered sitting in the mud in his underdrawers, holding his head with one hand and his balls with the other.

At8:30on the evening of the twelfth, the _Brmmo__ pulled into Galati harbor and Khristo walked up a long ramp onto the quay,Ivoat his side. The docks were lit by dazzling floodlights, and he could see a small army of welders crawling around in the skeletons of newly raised cranes, showers of blue sparks raining down through the girders. "Good luck,"Ivosaid. He reached into a pocket and handed over a thick packet of Romanian lei. Khristo was a little taken aback, it was a great deal of money. "From your friends,"Ivosaid. "It's a cold world without friends." "It is from Drazen Kulic?" "Him. And others." "You will thank him for me?" "Of course. There is also this: it is suggested that you take a taxi to Sfintu Gheorghe--no need to walk with all that money. Best to show the driver that you have sufficient means for the ride. Then, on your way back, use the same taxi. Lake Murigheol is one place you ought to see, as long as you've come this far. Quite beautiful in the spring, it's said. And you should have it all to yourself--tourists are not expected." "Is it close to Sfintu Gheorghe?" "Some few kilometers. The man who drives the taxi ought to be able to find it." They shook hands. "Thank you," Khristo said. "My pleasure. Now the work begins--a hundred papers to be stamped by idiots, then we'll have to shove this wretched pipe all the way back to Yugoslavia. _Upstream."__ He grimaced at the thought. "No. Really? For God's sake, why?" Ivoshrugged. "We need it more than they do. Let them be satisfied with a fraternal gesture."� "A lot of work for a fraternal gesture." "Yes, but there's nothing to be done about it." He nodded back toward the pipe-laden barge, his expression a parody of helplessness. "Wrong gauge," he said. There was a bonfire in Sfintu Gheorghe. Four men in shirtsleeves, ties pulled down, were dancing to the music of a violin, each holding the corner of a white handkerchief. The men were very drunk, and it was not a large handkerchief. But the violin was rapturous, the crowd was banging knives and forks and tin pots, and the dancers made up in gravity what they lacked in grace. Two of the men were wearing tinted glasses, and all had bolstered pistols beneath their armpits. Khristo Stoianev, still vibrating from a three-hour taxi ride over a cart track, stood quietly at the edge of the crowd. A heavy woman turned partway toward him and stared uncertainly. He smiled warmly, clapped his hands to the rhythm with broad enthusiasm, and was rewarded with a shy smile in return. He spent some time in this way, letting them notice him, letting them accepthim as someone who did not mean them harm. Villagers, he knew, could communicate without speaking--a subtle defense mechanism--and somehow come to a silent decision about the intentions of strangers. You had to let them read your character. When they began to lose interest in him, he looked over the crowd and picked out the village priest. There would be, in such a place, a triumvirate of leadership: a headman or mayor, a queen of wives, and a local priest. Any one of them would know where Sascha was--if they did not know of him, he was not there. When people grow up in a small village, they learn all the hiding places. The priest was not hard to find. He was a young man, with hair and beard worn long in the Greek Orthodox manner, and his black cassock fell to the tops of his shoes. Khristo circled the crowd casually until he stood next to him. "Praise God, Father," he said, using very slow French. "My son," the man acknowledged. He was flooded with relief. He could not speak Romanian, but he knew that most educated people in the country had a second language--German or French. "A feast," he said. "Is there a wedding?" "No, my son," the priest said. "The village has been blessed today. A good deed has returned to us." "And you have guests," he said. The men with the pistols, sweating in the night air, moved with slow dignity as the violin encountered a brief period of melancholy. "We are all countrymen," the priest said. "Praise God." Khristo heard clearly the relief in the latter statement. "Is there one guest missing?" he asked gently. "A man with dark hair? A man who has seen the world?" Now he had put himself at the priest's mercy and feared what he would do next. One shout would be sufficient, he thought, yet who would shout at a feast? The priest's eyes sharpened in the firelight and Khristo knew that Sascha wassomewhere in the village. His fingers dawdled for a moment by the pocket where the money nested, but instinct told him that such an offer would not be well received. The music picked up and he shouted "Hey!" and clapped his hands. "Are you a believer?" the priest said. "I am, Father," he answered matter-of-factly, "though I have strayed more than I should these last few years." The priest nodded to himself. He had been forced to make a decision and he had made it. "You should attend church, my son," he said, and pointedly broke off the conversation, walking forward a pace or two to be nearer the dancers. Khristo could see the church; its silver-painted dome reflected light from the bonfire. He moved slowly away from the crowd in the opposite direction, then circled around behind a row of little houses, climbing over garden fences and groping ahead of him for beanpoles and twine. The local dogs loved a feast as well as the villagers, for which he was thankful--the last thing he needed was a dog to wear on his ankle and these yards, he knew, were their sacred territories. The church was dark and silent. He watched it for a time but it told him nothing--an old mosque, built under Turkish rule, with a cross mounted atop the dome when Christianity returned. He opened the door a few inches, then stepped inside and let it close behind him. It smelled musty, like old straw, and there wasn't a sound to be heard."Sascha,"he whispered. There was no answer. He regretted, now, leaving his little automatic on the _Brovno,__ but his cover would not allow for it. A Yugoslav river sailor just might turn up in Sfintu Gheorghe--an armed Yugoslav river sailor had better not. There was the faintest trace of light in the church, filtering in from a high window. He moved slowly down an aisle between wooden benches until he reached the altar."Sascha?" There was no answer. To the left of the altar, out of the sightline of the benches, was a pole ladder. He walked to the base of it, slowly, and looked up to see the edge of a loft."Sascha, it's Khristo. Stoianev. I've come to take you away, to take you to freedom," he said in Russian. There was no answer. Had he left the church? Perhaps the meaning of the priest's statement had been innocent, the man simply telling him to go to church more often for the good of his soul. He took a step back from the ladder, his thoughts settling on the taxi that waited for him at the edge of the village. "Sascha Vonets."He said it in a normal voice. "Are you in this church?" There was only silence, the muffled sound of the violin, a shout of laughter, barking dogs. He was going to have to climb the ladder. He put one foot on the bottom rung and bounced to make sure it would take his weight, then moved up a rung at a time. "I'm coming up to talk to you," he whispered into the darkness. A fool's errand, he thought. The man was likely a thousand miles away while he whispered nonsense into an empty church loft. Still, he kept climbing. He reached the point where he could see over the edge of the loft, but it was very dark, walled off from the high window. He went up another rung and swung one foot onto the boards of the loft. He kicked something, a plate by the sound of it, which went skittering away across the floor. There was an orange flame and a pop and he fell backward, landing on his back and taking the ladder down with him. "Oh no," he said. He got to his hands and knees and crawled past the altar, down the aisle between the benches, shouldered the door open and rolled himself down the three steps to the dirt street, then wedged himself between the steps and the wall of the church. He tore at his clothes until he found it. He couldn't see very well, but it was midway up his left side, just below the ribs, a small hole like a nail puncture, with blood just beginning to well from the center. As he watched, the blood made a droplet that swelled until it broke loose and ran slowly down his skin. He covered the wound gently with a cupped hand, as though it embarrassed him. It hurt a little, like a cut, but there was a frightening pain on the left side of his chest and he realized that he was gasping for air. From within the church there was a crash, then the sound of running footsteps. _Here they come,__ he thought. But there should have been more of them--in the houses, among the crowd, everywhere--the NKVD used scores of people to set a trap. A man threw open the door and ran down the steps into the street, a pistol in his hand. His hair and beard were wildly disarrayed, his motions frantic and abrupt."Satans! Where are you? Murderers!" he mumbled, as though to himself. Suddenly he discovered Khristo, ran toward him and peered into his face. "Is it Khristo?" he said, seemingly stunned at finding him crumpled between the steps and the wall of a church. "You killed me," Khristo said, voice sorrowful and tired. The pain in his chest was fierce and there was no air to breathe. In the distance, the violin began to play a new kind of song. It was a jazz song, one he'd heard before, but he could not remember its name. The man knelt above him. "Oh God," he said. "It is you." He shrugged. He no longer cared about anything. "Why did you speak Russian? You frightened me." He coughed, spit something on the ground."Sascha?" "Yes?" "Look what you did." From his kneeling position, Saschafell backward and sat on the ground and began to sob, clutching his face in his hands. He began to have a dream, and in this dream Lake Murigheol was violet, like the lakes he had seen from the deck of the _Brmmo. __ Such a place seemed to him remote, difficult to approach. The driver of the taxi would argue and say there was no road and the rest of the money would have to be given to him and still he would not go and finally Saschawould put the gun against the back of his neck--.. the old place--and call him names in Russian until he turned the key in the ignition. Then later Saschawould remember that the "Red Banners" poem had been left in the church and they would have to go back and then start all over again. Then they would drive across fields on flat tires with the driver howling and swearing and Khristo bleeding and Saschacrying and waving the gun around and finally they would reach Lake Murigheol. There would be a seaplane, of course, with the usual freckle-face American pilot and some gangly fellow in a blue suit and vest and tie, and eyeglasses that made him look like an owl, standing there like a diplomat and holding a submachine gun away from his side so the grease wouldn't get on his suit, and he would be tense as the pilot fired up the engines and they began to move across the darkness of the violet lake, and he would ask if the villagers of Sfintu Gheorghe had enjoyed the party which he--fortunate one indeed--had given them. And he would see that Khristo was shot and he would be concerned and Khristo would pass out and come to and pass out again andwake to a moment when the plane quivered and roared and made white plumes of the violet surface until they lifted up and just barely over the tops of the trees and he realized that he was going home now on a new river and that only when he got there would he find out where home was and what it was like and how that river ran and the last thing he thought was that he hoped he would like it there. In late September of1945,in Manhattan, Muriel Friedman walked from her apartment building on West End Avenue up to Cake Masters bakery on Broadway, where she purchased two dozen jelly doughnuts, then hailed a cab and returned to West End Avenue, where Estelle Kleinman was waiting in front of her building on the corner of Eighty-third Street. The cab was then directed south, to Forty-sixth Street and Twelfth Avenue, the area of the docks. The two women were volunteers for the USO,the organization which, among other things, greeted servicemen returning from overseas on troop transports, serving them coffee and doughnuts as they disembarked. In most cases, the transports carried hundreds of troops and the doughnuts were trucked in from commercial bakeries in Long Island City. But Muriel Friedman had been telephoned the night before by her USOsupervisor and told that the next day's arrival, the Sk�aad, would be disembarking only four or five passengers, to go ahead and buy a few boxes of doughnuts at the store, for which she would be reimbursed. She could have gone up to Gris-tede's and bought box doughnuts, but she had decided to do something a little grander than that and absorb the cost herself. The money didn't matter. Vanity Frocks, her husband Mort's company, was once again manufacturing dresses, having spent most of the war producing uniforms for the army. A jelly doughnut baked that morning was a much friendlier greeting to a returning serviceman than a plain old box doughnut and, in Muriel Friedman's view of the world, such small gestures were important. The Sk�aadwasan old Norwegian freighter caught by the outbreak of the war in the Spanish port of Algeciris and used as a Liberty ship thereafter, successfully making the convoy run from American harbors to Murmansk--the chief supply port of the Soviet Union--many times during the war. Now she was nearing the end of her days. She'd carried a cargo of Jeeps and medical supplies from Baltimore to Athens, then called at Istanbul for a load of jute destined for rope factories in the southern United States, stopping at several ports on the way home to take on a few military passengers as well as sixty coffins--fallen American servicemen whose families had requested they be re-interred in military cemeteries in their homeland. In the back of the cab, Estelle Kleinman glanced at the two Cake Masters boxes tied with string and lifted an eyebrow. "Cake Masters?" she said. "A few jelly doughnuts," Muriel said. "The world won't end." Estelle's disapproval was silent, but Muriel didn't care whether she liked the idea or not. Estelle Kleinman disapproved of almost everything, and it was much too nice a morning for an argument. Riding down West End Avenue, Muriel could see it was the first real day of autumn, the sky was bright and blue and the wind off the Hudson River made the city streets seem clean and fresh. When the driver took them up on the elevated West Side Highway they could see the river, sun sparkling on the water, surface ruffled by the wind. They paid off the cab at Pier48and busied themselves in the USOoffice with a large coffee urn that had to be coaxed into action. A bridge table was carried out to the street entrance of the pier by a burly longshoreman with U.S. Navy tattoos on his forearms. He pinched his finger setting the thing up and swore under his breath, then declined the quarter Muriel offered. The jelly doughnuts were laid out on paper napkins in front of the coffee urn and the two women waited patiently for the ship, sharing a few bits of gossip about friends in the neighborhood. At12:30,the Sk�aadwasjust docking, the river tugs that had hauled her up past the Statue of Liberty nudging her gently against the old wooden pier. There was a pause, perhaps a half hour, while customs officials boarded the ship, then, at1:15,the handful of passengers began to appear. A naval ensign exclaimed over the jelly doughnuts, and both Muriel and Estelleflirted with him in their own particular way while he sipped a mug of coffee and kept an eye on the street, apparently waiting for someone. Two businessmen, perhaps Turkish, declined the jelly doughnuts with elaborate courtesy, then hurried off toward the rank of taxicabs that waited at the docks. An army major ran right past them, swept up in the arms of a blond woman and an old man--wife and father, Muriel thought. Then, finally, one last passenger appeared, walking slowly from the great dark structure that covered the pier and blinking at the bright sunlight. There was something different about this one, Muriel thought. He had black hair set off by pale skin, and deep blue eyes over high cheekbones. Striking, she thought, if you liked that Slavic type. He walked slowly, with a slight limp, and once touched a place on his left side as though it hurt him. Wounded, she realized. Wounded in the war, and now coming home. Or was it home? He appeared to be very nervous, stopping at the pier entrance and tugging at the jacket of the light gray suit he wore. With dark blue shirt and yellow tie he was clearly what Muriel would call a "greenhorn," a newcomer, an immigrant. She could see it in his eyes--how he looked and looked, trying to take in everything at once, struck with fear and joy and excitemerr over finally setting foot in America. Well, she thought, he would learn what it was, he would find his place in it. They all had. When her father had come to Ellis Island from Latvia in1902he must have looked something like this. Overwhelmed, for the moment, as the dream turned into reality before his eyes. The passenger in the gray suit never noticed the coffee and jelly doughnuts on the bridge table with the USOsign tacked to its edge. Estellestarted to call out to him, but Muriel put a restraining hand on her arm, and for once in her life she had the sense to shut up. The moment was too private for intrusion. Let him be with his thoughts. For a few seconds Muriel shared his feelings, seeing it all for the first time, taking the first step along with him as he moved from the shadow of the pier. Then, from across the street, a young woman appeared, climbing out of a cab and walking briskly toward the entrance to the pier. She had short, chestnut-colored hair and green eyes. Jewish, Muriel thought. Wearing a very good wool dress from--Saks? Lord&Taylor? Was she perhaps meeting this immigrant? Maybe he was not so alone and friendless as he appeared. Her eyes searched the crowd, then the young man in the gray suit waved his hand and called out "Faye!" and her face lit up with pleasure. Muriel watched carefully as they approached each other and shook hands. _So formal?__ she thought. All the way from God only knows where, by what means she could not even imagine, to be greeted by a handshake? She found herself vaguely disappointed and started to turn away. But then, as they crossed toward the waiting taxicab, sidestepping the honking trucks and cars that filled the busy street that served the docks, she took his arm. _There,__ Muriel thought, _that's better.__

The End

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Research on this book involved a considerable range of source material, but I want to mention particularly R. Harris Smith's history of the OSS as having provided, on page241,the conceptual key for the novel. I am grateful for the attention and care of Louise Noble, art director,Luise Erdmann,manuscript editor, and Ann Stewart, book designer. I wantt�nk Michael Speers,for advice and encouragement;Melanie Jackson, for her faith in me and in this project; and my editor, Robie Macauley, for the kind of support that, in a perfect world, every writer would have with every book. A special word of thanks to William Curran,a great friend to this novel and a man who knows about maps and borders and the rivers that cross them.