Blood of Victory (12 page)

Just outside the railyards of Trieste, the night frozen and black and starless, it turned 1941. The engineer sounded the train whistle, more lost and melancholy than usual, the way Serebin heard it, and Marie-Galante looked at her watch and kissed him. Then they held on to each other for a long time—for hope, for warmth in a cold world, because at least they weren’t alone, and it would have been bad luck not to.

They shared a first-class compartment, on that part of the journey, with a sallow young man reading an Italian book, dense and difficult by the look of it, who waited until they parted, then said, “Please allow me to wish you both a happy and prosperous New Year.” They returned the Italian salutation in French, everybody smiled, life was bound to get better.

And maybe it would but, for the moment, they traveled incognito.

A month earlier, in the hours before he left the city of Izmir, Serebin, following the written instructions he’d found in his room, had two dozen passport photos made, then left at the portrait studio to be picked up later. Now he understood why. Marie-Galante had brought him a new identity, the passport of Edouard Marchais, well-used, with several stamps from here and there, an
Ausweis
permit for travel to Roumania, and various other documents Marchais would be expected to have. Marie-Galante, newly Madame Marchais, was dressed for the part in a black, belted overcoat, cut in the latest Parisian style, and a brown beret. On the subject of new identities she was exceptionally casual—paper was paper, it could be made to appear when you needed it. So, now that all he wanted was to be invisible, he could be whoever he liked.

They had to change trains in Belgrade, and waited for hours in the station, where they found, left on a bench, a
Paris Soir,
with the headline
CIVIL WAR IN ROUMANIA?
This did not sound like life getting better, unless you believed in question marks.

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

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

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

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

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

Senior official, Defense ministry

Private investigator

Sofrescu’s mistress

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

Former ambassador to Portugal, silk stockings

Siguranza, financial specialist

Colonel, General Staff, ordnance acquisition

Publisher, friend of the playwright Ionesco

Journalist, gossip and blackmail

A hundred and fifty-eight times.

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

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

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

The idea amused her. “Called?”

“Oh, how about, ‘Bucharest’?”

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

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

Visit a hundred and fifty-eight souls?

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

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

“Someone you know?”

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

“Anyone else?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’re so pleased...”

“Madame Marchais, Madame Maniu.”

“Enchanté.”

“Colonel, come sit over here.”

“Madame Maniu, allow me.”

“Why thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

“We’ve just come from the opera!”

“What was it?”

“
Rigoletto.
”

“Good?”

“
Long.
”

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

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

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

“And tomorrow?”

Maniu shrugged.

Madame Maniu gave him a look.

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

“She certainly did,” Madame Maniu said.

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

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

“And he gave you my name? Personally?”

“He did.”

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

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

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

“They are madmen,” Madame Maniu said.

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

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

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

“Bucharest!”

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

A different volunteer: “Where?”

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

Laughter.

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

Laughter.

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

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

“Now the fun begins,” the colonel said.

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

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