Blood of Victory (14 page)

The car door opened, the dome light went on, somebody swore, and the door slammed. They heard footsteps crunching in the snow.

He was sixteen, Serebin thought. With a strange, elongated face—something wrong with him. Hair cut high above the ears, armband with symbol. He carried a rifle and, when he saw them, he lazily pointed it at Serebin’s heart and spoke a few words, his voice edgy and tight. They raised their hands. He beckoned, they stepped toward him, and he backed up until all three were just under the edge of the arch.

He stared at them for a moment, swung the rifle back and forth, from one to the other, then worked the bolt.

“’Bye,
ours.
”

The boy spoke again, irritated. And again.

“What’s he want?” Marie-Galante said.

Serebin had no idea.

Pointed to his eyes, then away.

“He means,” Serebin said, “don’t look at me while I do this.”

“Fuck him.”

A voice from the car, a question.

An answer, fast, thick with tension.

Again, the voice from the car.

The boy with the rifle answered, querulous this time.

The car door opened, then slammed shut. Somebody spoke, and the searchlight hit Serebin full in the face. He had to close his eyes.

But he’d seen that the second one was older, and had a pistol of some sort in his hand. That meant command. “Lei,” the man said. “Francs, pounds.”

Serebin thought of saying “Reichsmarks,” which would save their lives, but he didn’t have any. Instead, he reached slowly into his pocket and threw money, mostly lei, on the snow. Marie-Galante took off her watch and her necklace and dropped them on the money. The man pointed to her hand, she added her wedding band.

“Passportul.”

Serebin produced his passport and tossed it on the ground. Marie-Galante searched her small evening bag, swore, mumbled something about the hotel room, then found hers. The older man picked them up, along with the money and the jewelry. He paged through the passports, saw the
Ausweis
and other German documents, then said
“Franculor,”
French, and tossed them away.

He spoke to the boy with the rifle. It sounded like a man talking to someone he knows is crazy—soothing, but firm. The boy lowered the rifle. The commander turned to Serebin and Marie-Galante, said, “Hotel,” and jerked his head in the direction they’d been going in the cab. When he saw that Serebin understood, he said,
“La revedere, domnul,”
good evening, and the two returned to the car. The searchlight went off, the car turned around and drove away.

Serebin saw the boy again, a few days later. Or maybe not, there was no way to be sure. He’d been hung from an iron bar that held the sign for an umbrella shop, and the face was quite different, but Serebin rather thought it was him.

THE GREEN SALON

5 January, 1941.

They watched it go on, for the next few days, sometimes from the tall windows in their room, the red and gold drapes tied back with braid, sometimes through the doors in the lobby, which looked out on an empty square and a statue of a brass king on a brass horse.

No windows in the lobby itself, only yellow marble pillars, settees in raspberry plush, Bordeaux carpets, mirrored walls, and, through a pair of arches, a green salon, with foreign newspapers laid out on low marble tables, and a gold-framed photograph of King Carol on an easel. In the green salon, one ordered Turkish coffee and listened to the fighting; around the royal palace, just next door, or the nearby police station. It was old Europe in the green salon, it smelled of araby—the scent, like violets, worn by Roumanian men, smelled of leather, of Turkish tobacco.

Sometimes the fighting stopped, and in the silence some of the guests went out for a breath of air and wandered through the streets, though not
too
far, to see what they could see. At dusk, on the third day of fighting, in the strada Stirbei Voda, Serebin came upon a bloodstain on the snow and a burning candle. He walked another block and saw, chalked on a wall,
Homo hominus lupus est.
Hobbes’s phrase, “It is man who is the wolf of mankind.” And what heartbroken citizen had dared, in the hours of street fighting, to do such a thing? Well, he was Serebin’s friend for life, whoever he was.

When the attack began—the traditional occupation of the national radio station, followed by the traditional plea for public calm and the traditional proclamation of a new regime—the Bucharest police, armed with pistols and rifles, had fought back, but they were no match for the legionnaires. Then the army appeared. Much the subject of rumors in the hotel lobby—
the army has refused to leave its barracks, the army has gone over to the Guard.
But then, very late on the second night, Serebin woke to the sound of cannon fire and saw a spectral Marie-Galante, nude and pale, staring pensively out the window. “At last, the army,” she said.

He joined her. Down on the strada Episcopiei, a group of artillerymen, in the sand-colored uniforms of the Roumanian army, were firing a field gun; a tongue of flame at the barrel, a shell tearing through the sky, then a distant explosion. And, on both sides of the street, as far as he could see, infantry, running from doorway to doorway, one or two at a time, going wherever the shells were going.

“It’s over,” Serebin said.

And, a day later, it was. In Bucharest, anyhow. For the time being.

Elsewhere, it continued. There were maps in the newspapers every day, and in some apartments, all across the continent, there were maps pinned to the kitchen wall. So it could be followed, studied, day after day, the war that went here, then there. To Libya, where British troops fought Italian units at Tobruk, to Albania, where Greek troops pushed Italian divisions back across the Shkumbi River and headed for Tirana. To northern Italy, where British warships from Gibraltar entered the Gulf of Genoa, shelled the city’s port, and bombarded the oil refinery at Leghorn.

That story was in the
Tribune de Genève,
which Serebin read in the green salon, while eating a large sugared bun studded with raisins. At the next table, a thin woman wearing bright red lipstick, a fur stole around her shoulders, spoke German to a friend. “My dear, I cannot
abide
this Marshal Antonescu, ‘the Red Dog’ I think they call him. Is that because he is a communist?”

“No, my dear, it’s his hair, not his politics.”

“Is it. Well then, I
do
so hope the Guard will, ah, put him down.”

They both laughed, gaily enough, but it was not to be, and, a day later, as the snow melted beneath a winter sun, the captured legionnaires were taken away in trucks, or dealt with in the street. Still, it wasn’t over yet, not according to the hall porter on the fifth floor, who shook his head and was sorry about the way people were now.

That afternoon, Serebin and Marie-Galante went to the strada Lipscani house to make telephone calls. Rather vague and general—
an acquaintance in Paris suggested...Would so-and-so be at home?
Then Serebin took a tram out to a neighborhood of opulent homes, where a retired naval officer had coffee served in the conservatory and said he had never heard of DeHaas AG.

Serebin got away as quickly as possible, and found Marie-Galante waiting for him at the Lipscani house, just back from an hour with a prominent lawyer.

“What did he say?” Serebin asked.

“He said that some people preferred to make love only in the afternoon.”

“And then?”

“That some women required a firm hand to make them passionate.”

“And
then
?”

“I mentioned DeHaas. He gave up on the firm hand in the afternoon, and explained that the Roumanian legal system was dynamic, not static, that it followed the French, not the English model, particularly with respect to contracts concerning the disposition of agrarian lands.”

“Well, good, I was worried about that.”

“He went on. And on. Eventually, he showed me to the door, told me I was beautiful, and tried to kiss me.”

Dr. Latanescu, the economist, was dead.

And the Hungarian bank employee had returned to Budapest. But Troucelle, the French petrochemical engineer, seemed pleased with a French telephone call—made by Marie-Galante, the native speaker—and invited them to lunch at the Jockey Club. “I’m free tomorrow. Can we say, one o’clock?”

He waved and smiled when they came through the door, clearly delighted at the prospect of lunch. Which was quite good; a puree of white beans, boiled chicken with sour cream and horseradish, and a bottle of white Cotnari, from Moldavian vineyards on the Black Sea.

“The Burgundy
négociants
needn’t worry,” he said, tasting the wine, “but they don’t do so badly here.”

He was terribly bright, Serebin thought. Young and brisk and competent, a classic product of the Sorbonne’s Polytechnique, wandering abroad, like so many Frenchmen, to make his fortune in foreign lands. Over lunch they followed, as best they could, the Gallic prohibition,
no discussion of work or politics at table,
and made it just past the chicken—a considerable achievement given the situation in the city. Then Troucelle said, “I have to confess, I’ve thought and thought, but I don’t believe I actually know this Monsieur Richard you mentioned.”

“No?” Marie-Galante said. “He was here maybe two or three years ago, with a company called DeHaas.”

“Hmm. Could he have used another name?”

“Well, he could have. But why would he?”

Troucelle had no idea. “Of course you never know, with people, especially abroad.”

“No, that’s true.”

And there she let it stay.

A waiter pushing a pastry cart arrived at the table. “Just coffee, I think?” the civilized Troucelle suggested. From Marie-Galante, the Genghis Khan of the dessert table, civilized agreement.

“After Poland,” Troucelle said, “I remember thinking, ‘I expect someone from DeHaas will turn up here.’ Appears I was right, no?”

“Logical, really, when you think about it.”

“I enjoyed my connection with Kostyka,” Troucelle said. “One only met his
people,
of course, he never appeared in person. Always the
fusées.
” It meant fuses, in French political slang, intervening layers of aides and assistants who would “burn out” before an important person could be reached by the law. “And in the end,” Troucelle continued, “the whole thing didn’t amount to much, a few research reports on the petroleum industry. And they were quite generous about it.”

“Even more so, now, I would think.”

“Yes, it’s only logical, as you put it. What sort of information do you suppose they’d want?”

Marie-Galante wasn’t sure. “Perhaps what you gave them before, but it’s not for us to say. The war was a shock to the commercial world, even though everybody could see it coming, but business can’t just stop dead. So it’s mostly a matter of flexibility—I suspect that’s the way DeHaas would see it. Find a way to adapt, to adjust, then get on with life.”

The waiter brought tiny cups of coffee, a dish of curled lemon peels, and little spoons.

“Going up to Ploesti?” Troucelle said.

“Think it’s a good idea?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s all
there,
you know, it was a real, honest-to-God oil town before the war, Texas riggers and all. They used to have contests on Saturday night, get drunk and see who could shoot out the most streetlights. A little bit of Tulsa, east of the Oder.”

“We have business in Bucharest,” Serebin said, “and our time is limited. But, maybe, if we have the opportunity...”

“It would be my pleasure,” Troucelle said. “I’d enjoy showing it to you.”

“Nazi bastard,” Marie-Galante said—but by then they were out in the street, walking back toward the hotel.

“How do you know?”

“I know.” And, a moment later, “Don’t you?”

He did. He couldn’t say how he did, it was just, there. But then, he thought, that’s why they’d hired him.
I. A. Serebin—Minor Russian writer, émigré.

After midnight, in the room in the hotel, Serebin stared up at the ceiling and smoked a Sobranie. “Are you awake?” he said.

“I am.”

“Just barely?”

“No, I’m up.”

“Want me to turn on the light?”

“No, leave it dark.”

“Something I want to ask you.”

“Yes?”

“Did DeHaas actually do something? Or did it just, exist?”

“I believe they were in the business of building steam mills. Flour mills.”

“Were they built?”

“That I don’t know. Probably the office functioned, sent letters, telegrams, talked on the phone. Maybe they built a few mills, why not?”

“But these people, Maniu, the lawyer, they knew what they were doing.”

“Oh yes.”

“And Troucelle, of course he knew. And he knows what we’re doing now, and that it has to do with Roumanian oil—all that business about Ploesti.”

“Yes, the instinct of the
agent provocateur.
‘And, they’re going up to the oil fields, why not arrest them there?’”

“So?”

“So it’s a problem, and it has to be solved. He may just want to be bribed, and, if that’s it, we’ll bribe him. Or, he may go to the Siguranza, but that’s not the end of the world. You see, Polanyi calculated that we’d talk to the wrong person, sooner or later. But he counted on two things to keep us safe, two forms of reluctance. If Troucelle turns us in, like a good little Vichy fascist, he turns himself in as well. Why do these people, who want to spy on Roumania, come to him? Because he used to spy on Roumania himself. Oh really, they’ll say, you did? When? What did they pay you? Who else did it? You don’t know? Sure you know, why won’t you tell us? Clearly, he’d best think things through very carefully before he goes singing to the Roumanians.

“And then, the second kind of reluctance is in the Siguranza itself, up at the top. They’d better have a meeting, because they’d better talk about how it’s going to go here. Today’s enemy may be tomorrow’s ally, then what? Seven months ago, Germany wouldn’t dare attack the mighty French army behind its impregnable Maginot Line. Seventeen months ago, Germany wouldn’t dare to attack Poland, because the Red Army would go to war against them and in six months the Mongolian hordes would be fucking the Valkyries in the Berlin opera house. The world has come undone, my love, and this thing isn’t over, and, when it is, quite a considerable number of people are going to discover they jumped into the wrong bed.”

“All right. But what if he goes to the Germans?”

“Well, a lot depends on which Germans he goes to. If he’s best pals with the chief of Gestapo counterintelligence in Roumania, that’s the end of us. With the others, the SD or the Abwehr, it’s not so bad. They’ll watch and listen and wait—they’ll want
more,
there’s always
more.
And, the way Polanyi has it planned, we have a good chance to disappear while that’s going on. As it is, we’re only here for a few more days, then out. If you don’t have time to do it right, Polanyi figured, do it wrong, do it fast and ugly, break all the rules, and run like hell. That’s why you’re called Marchais, my sweet, so you can return as Serebin.”

“Well, it
sounds
good,” Serebin said. “Safe in bed, it sounds good.”

“Polanyi is a kind of genius,
mon ours,
dark as night, but what else would you want? He’s done these things all his life—that’s
all
he’s done. He once told me that he’d been taken to some kind of lawn party, at the Italian legation in Budapest, where he made his way to a certain office and stole papers from a drawer. He was, at the time, eleven years old.”

“He went with his father?”

“He went with his
grandfather.
”

“Good God.”

“Hungarians, my sweet, Hungarians. Swimming for ten centuries in a sea of enemies—how the hell do you suppose they’re still there?”

Readily enough, the Princess Baltazar agreed to receive the friend of Monsieur Richard in Paris. As though, he told Marie-Galante, such calls were commonplace. The house was not hard to find, a white, three-story frosted cake, with turrets and gables, overlooking the botanical gardens. Once upon a time he had played on a beach in Odessa, and a little girl had taught him to take liquid sand from the edge of the sea and drizzle it through his fingers to decorate the top of a castle. The house of the Princess Baltazar reminded him of that.

She was somewhere beyond forty, blond and curly, pink and creamy, with a bosomy décolletage on a purple dress just tight enough to suggest the elaborate and complicated flesh beneath it.

“Monsieur Richard,” she said. “With the
pince-nez
?”

Who else?

“Such a brilliant man.” Would Monsieur care for coffee? Something to eat? There was a bit of Moldavian Swiss roll, she thought, or was it just too close to lunch?

“A coffee,” he said.

She left the room, haunches shifting high and low, and he could hear her making coffee in a distant part of the house. No maid? The tabletops in the parlor were covered with little things; china cats and porcelain dairymaids, demitasse cups and saucers, bud vases, ashtrays. And photographs in standing frames: Princess Baltazar with King Carol, Princess Baltazar with various significant men—minor royalty, chinless aristocrats, and two or three nineteenth-century types with grandiose beards and decorations.