Blood of Victory (15 page)

“So many friends,” he said, when she returned with the coffees and thick slices of the dangerous-looking Moldavian pastry.

“What other pleasures in this life?” she said, sitting next to him on the couch. “Will you relent on the roll, monsieur?”

Serebin smiled as he declined. “And who is this?” he said, pointing at one of the photographs.

“Ah, if you were Roumanian, you would not have to ask,” she said.

“A well-known gentleman, then.”

“Our dear Popadu, the economics minister, a few months ago, and a great friend of Elena’s.” She meant Lupescu, the former king’s mistress. “I am told he is lately in Tangier.” Sad for him, to judge from her expression.

“And this?” The man he pointed to looked like a Ruritanian minister in a Marx Brothers film.

Why that was Baron Struba, the well-known diplomat. “Poor man. He was on the train with Carol and Elena, and he was shot in the—well, he couldn’t sit down for a month.” Serebin knew the story. When Carol had abdicated in September, he’d had a train filled with gold and paintings, even his collection of electric trains, then made a run for the Yugoslavian border. Along the way, units of the Iron Guard had fired on the train and, while Lupescu, a real lioness, had remained resolutely in her seat, Carol had gone into exile cowering in his cast-iron bathtub.

“You seem to know,” Serebin said, “everybody.”

The princess was demure on that point, eyes lowered, saying volumes with a modest silence. When she looked up, she rested a hand on the couch by his side. “And what brings you to Bucharest?” she said. Her smile was inviting, her eyes soft. He was, if he let on that he was rich or powerful, going to be seduced.

“I am here to buy art,” he said.

“Art!” She was delighted. “I can certainly help you there. I know all the best dealers.” He could return to Paris, he realized, with a trunkful of fake Renoirs and Rembrandts.

“Then too, I wanted to do a favor for a friend of mine, who used to work for a Swiss company here. Called, what, DeHaas, I think, something like that.”

Her eyes changed, and there was a longish silence. “What sort favor?” Her French was dying.

“To see old friends. Get back in touch.”

“Who are you, monsieur?” she said. She bit her lip.

“Just a Parisian,” he said.

Her eyes glistened, then a tear rolled down her cheek.

“I will be arrested,” she said. She began to cry, her face contorted, a thin, steady moan escaping her compressed lips.

“Don’t, please,” Serebin said.

Her voice rose to a tiny, choked-back wail. “The matrons.”

“No, no, princess, no matrons, please, don’t.”

She began to fumble with the back of her dress, her face had turned a bright red. “I will please you,” she said. “I will astound you.”

Serebin stood. “I am so sorry, princess.”

“No! Don’t go away!”

“Please,” he said. “It was a mistake to come here.”

She sobbed, her face in her hands.

Serebin left.

Outside, as he walked quickly away from the botanical gardens, he realized that his hands were shaking. He headed for a café on the Calea Victoriei, sat on the glass-enclosed terrace, thought about a vodka, ordered a coffee, then took a newspaper on a wooden dowel from a rack by the cash register—a copy of
Paris Soir,
the leading Parisian daily.

Reading the paper did not make him feel better. The German propaganda line was not overt, but it was everywhere:
we are crusaders, out to rid Europe of Bolsheviks and Jews, and, regrettably, have been forced to occupy your country. Please pardon the inconvenience.
Thus twenty minutes of
Paris Soir
gave Serebin a bad case of traveler’s melancholy—what one learned not to see up close was unpleasantly clear from a distance. Life in Paris, said the paper, had always been amusing, and it still was. There were reviews of films and plays—romantic farce much the current taste. Recipes for stewed rabbit and turnips with vinegar—it may be all there is to eat, but why not make it delicious? Interviews with “the man on the street”—what ever happened to plain old common courtesy? There was rather hazy news of the campaigns in North Africa and Greece, with expressions like “mobile defense” and “strategic readjustment in the battle lines.” And news of Roosevelt, urging Congress to loan money and ships to Britain. Gullible people, the Americans, how sad.

And so on. From local murders, robberies, and fires, to indoor bicycle racing, and, finally, the obituaries. Which included:

The artistic community of Paris has been saddened to learn of the death of the Polish sculptor Stanislaus Mut. Turkish papers reported yesterday that his body had been found floating in the Bosphorus, death having occurred from unknown causes. Istanbul police are investigating. Born in Lodz in 1889, Stanislaus Mut lived much of his life in Paris, emigrating to Turkey in 1940. Two of his works,
Woman Reclining,
and
Ballerina,
are on display at the Art Museum of the City of Rouen.

Serebin recalled meeting Stanislaus Mut, who’d been courting a Russian woman at the
cocktail Américain
on Della Corvo’s yacht. What happened? An accident? Suicide? Murder? Did his presence at the party make him an associate of Polanyi’s? Serebin returned the paper to its rack and paid for his coffee.
Fuck this day, nothing’s going to go right.

But maybe it was only him. Back at the Athenée Palace, Marie-Galante had good news. She had visited with a professor of botany at the university. “He will do anything,” she said. “We have only to ask.”

“What can he do?”

That she didn’t know.

Well then, why was he there in the first place?

“He said he reported to DeHaas on developments in Roumanian science and technology.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t look at me like that. What happened with Princess Baltazar? Were you charmed? Were you—naughty?”

Serebin described the meeting.

“Maybe I should have gone with you,” she said, slightly deflated.

“You think it would have made a difference?”

She hesitated, then said, “No, probably not.”

The next two days were a blur. Life got harder: a number of calls went unanswered, and a few of the people who did answer spoke only Roumanian, managing an apologetic word or two in English or German, then hanging up. The heat went off in the Lipscani house, Serebin and Marie-Galante worked in their coats, breath steaming. The eight German names on the list were not telephoned. A police detective threatened to arrest them if they came anywhere near his house, while three people didn’t know a single soul in Paris or in France for that matter yes they were sure.

The wife of a civil servant thought they were selling bonds, which she made it very clear she didn’t want to buy. At the hotel desk, no contact from Troucelle, which was either good or bad, they couldn’t be sure. An accountant, from an office that worked on the books of the oil companies, said, “I cannot meet with you, I hope you will understand.”

“If the question is,” Serebin said to Marie-Galante, “can Kostyka’s intelligence
apparat
be brought back to life, perhaps we have an answer.”

“Don’t give up,” Marie-Galante said. “Not yet.”

Through the concierge at the Athenée Palace they hired a car and driver to take them up to Brasov, in the foothills of the Carpathians north of the city. “Dracula country,” Marie-Galante said. “Vlad Tepes and all that, though these days it’s mostly ski resorts.” And antique shops, where peasant arts and crafts were for sale. Serebin understood that Monsieur and Madame Marchais, having come to Roumania to buy folk art, had, eventually, to go and buy it. Still, he did not look forward to the excursion.

The driver told them his name was Octavian. A candidate, Serebin thought, for the oiliest man in Bucharest, which was no small distinction. His mustache was oiled to sharply pointed ends, oily curls sprang loose from his hair. Octavian welcomed them to his humble car—an old but highly polished Citroën with a plume of rich, blue smoke throbbing from its tailpipe, rubbed his hands like a concert pianist, grasped the wheel firmly and, after a moment of meditation, began to drive.

The road to Brasov took them through Ploesti, as it happened, where army officers manned checkpoints and demanded a special pass, required to enter the city, which they did not have. Octavian went off for a private chat with the commanding officer, then returned to the car and told Serebin what it cost. Could it be that much? Marie-Galante shrugged. Roumanian army officers were paid a daily wage of thirty lei, about six cents in American money, so bribery was a way of life. It had always been a poor country, too often conquered, too often plundered. The Russian General Kutuzov, preparing to invade Roumania in 1810, said of the Roumanians that he “would leave them only their eyes to weep with.”

Driving through Ploesti they could, now and again, get a view of the oil fields in the distant haze: the tops of the towers, and the natural gas flares, seen as wobbling air against a pale sky. A mile further on they reached the final checkpoint, at the northern edge of the city, with the usual crowd of Roumanian soldiers supplemented by two German SS officers. The Germans were curious, took the passports and examined them at length, made notes in a ledger, asked what brought them this way, and why no pass. Better not to have it, Serebin realized. Better to be hapless art dealers, confused and uncertain when it came to official papers and difficult things like that. The taller of the SS men was affable enough, until he asked Serebin for his wife’s maiden name. Serebin laughed nervously, then gave the name that Marie-Galante had insisted he memorize. “So,” she said as they drove away, “now you see.”

The road narrowed after Ploesti and wound through woods and farmland, the Carpathians looming high in the distance. Serebin’s spirits rose, it always surprised him how much he needed fields and trees. A city dweller, he thought himself, craving places where they kept cafés and conversations and books and love affairs. But he did not take sufficient account of his Odessan heart, eternally warm for a city that had, with its dirt streets and wild gardens and leaning shacks overgrown with vines, its own heart in the countryside. Marie-Galante felt his mood change, and took his hand in both of hers. At which moment Octavian met Serebin’s eyes in the rearview mirror and gave him an immensely oily and conspiratorial smile.
Women, always women, only women.

Brasov was a small city, still, at its center, more or less in the thirteenth century. “See there,” Octavian said. “The Black Church. Very famous.” It was black, an ashy black, like charcoal. “Toasted by the Austrians in 1689,” he explained, his French failing him for a moment.

In a narrow lane behind the church they found a row of antique shops, the owners, not expecting much business in January and civil war, called down to do business by Octavian shouting in the street. Serebin and Marie-Galante bought a large wooden trunk plastered with the labels of long-vanished steamships, then looked for folk art to pack inside, Octavian sometimes signaling to them with agonized glances when the price was too high.

Serebin bought toys. A wooden ball bound to a stick with a cord—though how a child would contrive to play with such a thing was completely beyond him, and a variety of spinning tops. Also wood carvings: a hut, a sheep, a few saints, and several hounds, some lying with crossed paws, others bounding after prey. Marie-Galante added embroidered vests, wooden and ceramic bowls, and a set of woodworker’s tools that could have been centuries old, then bought a Persian lamb hat for herself. She tried it on, setting it at various angles, as Octavian and the shopkeeper and Serebin looked on, and asked them did it look better like this? Or this?

Serebin had called the number earlier, with no success, and drawn a line through the entry:
Gheorghe Musa—senior civil servant.
On the right-hand side of the page, no indication of payment. Now, the morning after they returned from Brasov, he tried one last time. Dialed, then stared out the window and waited as the double ring, a dry whispery vibrato, repeated itself again and again. It would, he knew, never be answered.

But it was.

“Yes? Who’s calling, please.” It was the voice of an old man. Perhaps, Serebin thought, an old man whose phone had not rung for a long time.

“I hope I’m not intruding,” Serebin said.

“No, sir, you are not.”

“My name is Marchais, I happen to be in Bucharest, and I’m calling at the suggestion of a friend in Paris.”

“Marchais.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

In the silence on the telephone Serebin could hear the silence of the old man’s apartment.
He knows,
Serebin thought. Knows perfectly well what kind of telephone call this is, and he’s thinking it over. At last, a voice. “How may I help you?”

“Would it be convenient for us to speak in person?”

Another pause. “All right. Would you want to come here?”

Serebin said he did, and Musa gave him a tram number, a stop, and an address.

The apartment occupied an entire floor, up six steep flights of stairs. Inside it was dark, and so quiet that Serebin was conscious of the sound of his footsteps. It immediately occurred to him, though he could not have said how he knew, that no woman had ever lived there. Gheorghe Musa was a small man, frail, with a few wisps of white hair and a pleasant smile. “You are a rare visitor,” he said. For the visit, or perhaps it was his usual habit, he had dressed formally; a heavy, wool suit, of a style popular in the 1920s, a white shirt with a high collar, a gray tie.

Musa walked slowly to a room lined with bookcases that reached the ceiling. When he turned on a lamp, Serebin could see, by his chair, well-used editions of Balzac and Proust, a Latin dictionary, a set of German encyclopedias.

“And, so, what brings you to Bucharest?”

Serebin mentioned folk art, Brasov, then DeHaas.

“Oh yes,” Musa said. “Some years ago, I used to see a gentleman who worked for that organization. Owned by—he calls himself Baron Kostyka now, I believe. We used to pass information to them, now and then. Depending on what we wanted them to do.” His smile broadened in recollection. “Influence,” he said. “A ministry word.”