Blood of Victory (18 page)

The gulls were fishing. One of them landed on the rocks with a herring and had company right away.

“How was it?” Polanyi said.

“
Bordel.
” Whorehouse.

“It’s the war.”

“Is it.”

Polanyi spread his hands. “Not so good for your view of human nature, this work.”

“There were exceptions.”

“Well, one, anyhow.”

“More.”

Polanyi reached into a flap pocket on his coat and handed Serebin a telegram, wired care of André Bastien, with an Istanbul address. It had been sent to Marie-Galante a week earlier, and it was from Labonniere. Dry and to the point: he had been appointed second secretary at the French legation in Trieste, he needed her by his side.

Serebin handed the telegram back to Polanyi.

“Officially, you haven’t seen that,” Polanyi said. “But I thought you should see it.”

“When will you give it to her?”

“Right away.”

Serebin watched a fishing boat in the channel, its engine pounding as it fought the incoming tide.

“Working together like that,” Polanyi said. He looked over at Serebin, wondering if he needed to say more and saw that he didn’t. “She’ll have to come back to Istanbul with us.”

“When?”

“Late tonight, I think. We plan for you to leave Constanta tomorrow, by train.”

“Yes?”

“Back to Bucharest.”

Serebin nodded.

“You can say no, of course.”

He didn’t bother to answer.

“You should buy clothing, whatever you need, in Constanta. We’ll have someone take you to the store. But, before you do that, we’ll talk about everything that went on. You’ll find it tiresome, everybody does, but that can’t be helped. Would eleven suit you?”

“Eleven,” Serebin said.

Polanyi put both hands on the railing, hesitated, then walked away, heading toward the staircase that went to the cabins below.

Serebin spent a half hour on deck, then returned to the cabin. Marie-Galante was seated at the dressing table, putting on lipstick. She wore a slip and stockings, a towel wrapped around her hair. He saw that she’d made the bed, emptied the ashtrays, neatened up as best she could.

“Hello,
ours.
” She meant
good-bye,
her voice deeper than usual, tired, resigned.

He sat in a chair in the corner.

“I have to go away.” She pressed her lips together, turned them in for a moment, studied her image in the mirror. Not so good, but she didn’t care. “I have a wire from Labonniere. He’s been promoted, sent to the legation in Trieste. Ever been there?”

“Once or twice.”

“What’s it like?”

“Italian, Slovene, Croatian—everything, really. Very sunny and bright, at least when I was there.”

“Sunny and bright.”

“Yes.”

“That’s always good. Cheerful.”

She met his eyes in the mirror.

“I have to go,” she said. She undid the towel and began to rub her wet hair.

“I know.”

He walked over to her, she rose and put her arms around him, her damp hair against his cheek. They stayed like that for a time, then she let him go.

They sat around a table in the salon: Polanyi, Marrano, Serebin, Marie-Galante, and a young man in a silvery gray suit worn over a black sweater, with a sharp face and water-combed hair, introduced as Ibrahim. As Marrano began his report on Bucharest, both he and Polanyi took notes.

Serebin watched Marrano as he spoke.
The Renaissance assassin.
Dark eyes, pitted face, a thin line of beard that traced his jaw. His story did not sound so very different from theirs. A woman who slept with important men—lately, Marrano said, a German general. The manager of a telegraph office. A gossip columnist. A Siguranza officer. The last, after agreeing to meet with Marrano, had disappeared. Marrano telephoned late at night and talked to the man’s sister, who, very agitated, said nobody knew where he was.

“I did manage to see an assistant to Kobas, who was the oil minister until Antonescu took over. He was terrified, but brave. We met after midnight, in an abandoned building. He guessed right away what we were up to. ‘Don’t try anything,’ he said. ‘The fields are closely guarded. They’re just waiting for somebody to show up.’”

Polanyi nodded, he knew.

Marrano went on. Editor of a newspaper, who said that only the Legion could save Roumania from the Jews. A retired diamond merchant, in a wheelchair. A mystery woman, contacted through a Gypsy vendor at a street market. “Ilona, that’s all I know. I had to book an entire compartment on the train for Ruse, in Bulgaria. She appeared after the first stop, we talked for, maybe, five minutes, then she left. Very curious. Long, black hair, worn loose, dressed all in black, a scar by one eye, a gold wedding band on her right ring finger. She wore a purse on a shoulder strap, the way it hung I thought,
something
in there, am I to be shot? I think, maybe, if I’d said the wrong thing, it might’ve happened. She was very determined.”

Polanyi raised an eyebrow.

“She was paid a great deal of money,” Marrano said, “according to the list. And no last name, not even there. I believe DeHaas may not have known who she was.”

“Political?”

Slowly, Marrano shook his head. “‘If the job is worthy of me,’ she said, ‘I will do it.’”

Polanyi looked at Serebin.

“She did not say very much. Mostly she made me talk, and stared into my soul. Then she left at Daia station, suddenly, just as the train was about to leave. And I got off at the last stop in Roumania, Giurgiu.”

“The pipeline from Ploesti ends in Giurgiu,” Polanyi said.

“I knew that, so I decided to take a little walk, just to see what I could see. What I saw was the inside of a police station. For a very long hour, then a man in a suit showed up. A man who spoke French. Who was I? What was I doing there? Who did I know?”

“What did you tell them?”

“A woman.”

“They believe you?”

“Well, I’m here.”

Polanyi turned to Serebin and Marie-Galante. “
Mes enfants,
” he said. Marie-Galante began, Serebin joined in. Colonel Maniu. The lawyer. Troucelle, Princess Baltazar. Gheorghe Musa. The oil field study.

“We managed to have most of it translated,” Polanyi said. “Depressing, really. The vulnerabilities the General Staff saw in 1922 were exploited by the French in 1938, and by the British a year later. Without success. The French tried to lease the oil-barge fleet, the British mined the fields—but they never used the detonators. What they tried instead was to outbid the Germans for the oil, and that worked very well indeed. Too well, in fact. The price of Roumanian oil went through the roof, and the Germans couldn’t afford it. So they threatened to occupy the country. The Roumanians caved in, and gave them an exclusive sales agreement.”

“Where does that leave us?” Marrano said.

Polanyi sighed. “On the river, I suppose.”

“Broad and flat.”

“Yes. We’re on the wrong fucking end,” Polanyi said. “Maybe up toward the Iron Gates.”

“I would think,” Marrano said, “that the British have been over that ground.”

“They have. But, my friend, you must understand, it’s our turn.”

“Whatever it is, it won’t be permanent.”

Polanyi wasn’t ready to admit that. “The right catastrophe...But, you’re not wrong. More likely I will offer them time, weeks, and at least the potential for repetition. Of course we all dream of the great coup—we have to do that, no?”

Just after midnight, Serebin stood on the pier as the
Néréide
departed. Watched it motor out the channel into the Black Sea, where, a few minutes later, the light at the stern grew dim in the mist, then disappeared. Marie-Galante had said a final good-bye on deck; reserved, steadfast, a farewell in time of war, tears forborne to preclude the memory of tears.

At the Hotel Tomis, on the Constanta waterfront, he drank, to no effect, and busied himself with housekeeping: committing names to memory, turning phone numbers into letter code concealed in journalist’s notes. Thus his new identity: a French journalist, with the notional assignment of a story on a French traveling circus playing in Bucharest.
Crowds of children, clapping their hands in glee as they follow Caca the Elephant in the circus parade.

He burned his notes when he was done, washed the ashes down the sink, turned off the light, stared up at the world. He had met privately with Polanyi for an hour or so, and toward the end of the discussion Polanyi had said, “Labonniere is one of us, Ilya. Please understand. And while it is always preferable for a diplomat to be accompanied by his wife, it is crucial for a diplomat who is engaged in secret work. Crucial for this diplomat, anyhow, and, especially, this wife.”

The Hotel Tomis. By the Portul Tomis, the ancient Latin name for Constanta, infamous as the city of exile for the Latin poet Ovid. Who wrote a love poem that an emperor didn’t like. Thinking about that didn’t make Serebin feel any better, and it didn’t put him to sleep. But with time, and persistence, the vodka did.

In Bucharest, they’d found him a room in an apartment—a long way from the Athenée Palace and the center of the city—which belonged to an elegant, distant woman in her sixties who owned a jewelry shop. The strada Lipscani house was out of bounds, he’d been told, and the Hungarian operative, no Slav it turned out, sent back across the border. Serebin had two or three days’ work to do, then
la revedere, Bucuresti.
He sat on the bed in his room, unfolding two new shirts, squashing them this way and that to get rid of the creases, which resulted in rumpled shirts with creases.

To see the British foreign correspondent James Carr was not difficult. Serebin called the Reuters bureau, said he was an émigré with a story to tell, left a transparently common Russian name, and was in the office an hour later. He could have done the trick at the Associated Press or Havas—Carr was a freelance journalist and filed for any paper that needed a Bucharest dateline.

When Serebin arrived, Carr was half-sitting on the wooden railing in the reception area and telling a secretary some story that made her smile. He seemed, on first impression, a standard of the breed: tall and stooped, handsome face with a touch of Anglo-Saxon decadence, lank hair, dirty blond and too long unbarbered, a clever smile and a good blazer. The trench coat, hung carelessly on the clothes tree in the corner, was certainly his. “Jamie Carr,” he said, extending a hand with fingers yellowed by nicotine.

He ushered Serebin to a room in back. “All for us,” he said ruefully. It was too quiet—no sound of typewriters or telephones. “Looks like I’m going to be the last one out.”

“You’re leaving?”

This was in French. Carr answered in English, but slowly, so that Serebin could understand. “I damn well better,” he said. “I’m only here by virtue of an Irish passport. Neutral, you see. Officially. But that’s not true and the Legion knows it.” He settled himself in a swivel chair, Serebin sat on the other side of the desk. “Would you believe, somebody shot my bed? From the apartment below mine. Came home in the morning and there was a hole in the bloody thing.”

He offered Serebin a stubby Roumanian cigarette, lit one for himself, then produced a pad and pencil. “So then, what do you have for me?”

Serebin said he’d come to Bucharest to talk to people who’d done business with a company called DeHaas.

“No! That vulgar little shit. What’d he do, put my name on a list?”

Serebin nodded.

Carr opened a drawer, peered inside, found a tin ashtray. “Must be an interesting sort of a list, care to sell it?”

No point answering that.

Carr made a face, mock horror at the perfidy of it all. “
Quid pro quo,
was what that was. A private inquiry agent, so-called, and he told me a good deal more than I ever told him. But, lie down with dogs, get up with fleas. He was probably blackmailing half the sinners in Bucharest. Which is half the city.” He grinned. “Jesus Christ you only had to look at him.”

“Was it Zarrea?” The name was on the list.

Carr tapped his notepad with the pencil eraser. “Say, you know a lot.”

“Not much, just Kostyka’s
apparat.
Some of it, anyhow.”

“All right, so what do you want with me?”

“We might need your help, later on.”

“Oh? And who would I be helping, then?”

“Your English friends.”

Carr burst out laughing. “Jesus I hope not!” Then he stared at Serebin for a time. Puzzled. Something he couldn’t figure out. “You mean the real thing, don’t you. Out of some little office in London.”

“Yes.”

He drew a face on his pad. “Well, maybe I believe it but no matter, it’s a moot point. I won’t be here long enough to help anybody.”

Serebin started to rise, discussion over, but Carr waved him back down.

“Not oil, is it? It can’t be that.”

“Why not?”

“Been tried. And it don’t work. They sent a couple of their knights-errant out here in ’39 and they got shipped home in their underwear.” He started to say more, thought better of it, then went ahead anyhow. “You know,” he said, “they can blow it up any time they want.”

“They can?”

“Oh yes. But they haven’t, have they, and that means they don’t want to. Because, fact is, there are plenty of RAF bombers at British airfields in Greece, as we sit here, and they can go up to Ploesti and bomb the oil fields tonight. What is it, maybe five, six hundred miles? They have the range, there and back, no problem. But, somehow, it isn’t done. Now what does that mean, do you suppose? To me it means that somebody important says no.
Stop
the oil, sure, don’t let it reach Germany, but don’t bomb the wells. So they’ve got you sniffing around whorehouse Roumania instead, and all you’re going to get for your trouble is the clap.”

“Britain and Roumania are not at war,” Serebin said. “Not yet.”

“Balls,” Carr said. “A matter of weeks, a technicality. No, what’s going on here isn’t diplomacy, it’s money and influence, it’s business, and it happens every day. Back in 1916, for instance, the Allies were in cannon range of the steel mills at Thionville, in the Lorraine. The mills were behind the German line, at that point, the Germans were using them to make artillery shells, and we knew it. But, nothing happened. And that was thanks to the intervention of Baron de Wendel and his friends on the Comité des Forges—which meant Zaharoff and the rest of the arms merchants. These were
their
mills, so they wanted them back, in good condition, when the war ended.