Night Soldiers (34 page)

But a
barbette
was also a nun's veil that covered the breast, and that expression in turn was used in slang to mean sleeping on the floor or guns firing in a salvo. The word sometimes referred to a water spaniel—the efficient sort that always brought in the kill. They asked him, in their own way, but all they ever got was that laugh. They didn't really care—he was the kind of guy you liked even better because he wouldn't tell you what you wanted to know. It meant he wasn't in the habit of running his mouth, and that mattered to people out in Clichy. Johnny LaFlamme and Poz Vintre and Escaldo from Lisbon and Sarda, the deaf-mute who watched your mouth when you talked and knew what you were saying. They were all the family any of them had and they looked out for one another in their own way and they could smell a cop three blocks off. Barbette was no cop. But he wasn't one of them, either. He was something different.

The girls all said he was crazy, that he went for the
petite soeur
like a maniac who'd been marooned on an island. Maybe a bit of a showoff, they said, and he really liked that fancy stuff—nothing standing up—that went on all afternoon and left them worn out for their real work at night, down in the Rue St.-Denis near Les Halles or up in Montmartre. But the guys put up with it. Barbette was always good for a touch when you came up short and he never asked for it back. Everybody had to have one of those long coats like they had in
Little Caesar
or
Public Enemy—
and you couldn't steal those. The great Capone, they fancied, would have told them they looked just right.

Then one day he went off with Escaldo and Sarda and when they showed up again they were richer than they'd ever been. Sent away the rotgut the Dutchman dished up under the name
vin rouge
and ordered the real stuff—for themselves and everybody else. One couldn't ask questions. But the new wealth came from Barbette and it put matters in an entirely new, and very interesting, light. He'd gone from putting money in their bellies—drinks and whatnot—to putting money in their pockets, and that made him really important, no longer just a guy who came around. They were a little jealous of Escaldo and Sarda—why not me?—but they had nothing but time and maybe it was their turn next. Escaldo and Sarda, in the beginning, didn't say all that much. Sarda couldn't—not without a pencil and paper, and who wanted to bother with that—and Escaldo wouldn't. He looked like a pimp, dark and slick and vain, and he kept one of those Portuguese fish-gutting knives strapped to his ankle. You didn't press him too hard, the girls had found that out pretty quick. As for poor Sarda, his face was carved into deep lines from trying all his life just to do things that everybody else took for granted. When he got agitated, he made noises in his throat and privately they all admitted they were a little bit afraid of him. So, for a time, the wine flowed and the beef sizzled and everybody just shut up and waited patiently.

But in families everything comes out eventually, and Escaldo got drunk one night and let them in on part of it. He was, also, under some pressure to explain things. Some smart guy figured out that maybe Barbette banged the girls so hard to prove he wasn't a fairy, which meant maybe he was, which meant that Escaldo and Sarda had sunk to a level where it was definitely
out
of the family. Escaldo couldn't afford to let too much of that go on, so he sang.

The money they had now, he explained, was only the beginning. There'd be more—maybe a lot more, maybe the
big one
they all dreamed of and talked about. Barbette had taken them to an abandoned farmhouse somewhere to hell and gone outside Paris and he'd shown them these, ah, things, and run them through a little schooling and let them, even, use them a few times.
Bon Dieu! Quelles machines! Quelles instruments!
His eyes glowed as he talked, and it only took a few more glasses of marc to get the whole story out in the air.

Les machines à écrire de Chicago
.

There it was, now they had it all. Chicago typewriters. That's what Barbette had to show them on the broken-down farm outside Paris. Escaldo spread his long coat apart and took out two little pimp cigars and lit one for Sarda and one for himself. Did Bottles Capone, Al's brother, or Jake “Greasy Thumb” Guzik have anything they didn't?
Not anymore
.

Machine guns.

Around the table, nobody could say anything for a long time, thinking about that.

Khristo found a room deep in the Marais, on a dark side street off the Rue des Rosiers. It was an ancient building, narrow, seven flights to the top floor, with rusted iron pipes crossing the ceiling and a small window on a courtyard where it was nighttime from dawn to dusk. He rented the room from an old Jew bent in the shape of a
C
, with black sidelocks, beard, coat, and hat. “Who wants you, little one?” the man asked in Russian. “I don't understand,” Khristo answered in French. The man nodded to himself. “Oh, pardon me then,” he said in Russian.

The thought of Aleksandra's things in the treasure box, left to be pawed by the landlady, haunted him, but a return to the room was out of the question. Surely they had him spotted at Heininger as well, but it was less likely that they would snatch him there. He considered finding Yasin again, in the Turkish quarter out on the Boulevard Raspail, and acquiring another weapon, but he put it off. Ilya had given him a telephone number—that was his best weapon now. Had Ilya set him up? Kept him at the cemetery while Aleksandra was taken? Perhaps. Perhaps Ilya had been set up to set him up. At least he knew where he was now. On the NKVD chessboard, all his moves known and predicted, hostile knights and bishops dawdling while he figured out how to move onto the very square where they wanted him. Somehow, it didn't matter. Fate was fate. He would play the game out to checkmate, they would all meet again in hell.

Sweating in the late June weather, he stood in a telephone
cabinet
at the neighborhood post office while the call was put through. They answered on the first ring. He merely said, “I want a meeting.” They told him to be at the church of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre at 6:30 the following morning.

For early mass, Ilya was in worker's clothing, a copy of
L'Humanité
, the communist daily, folded under one arm. Khristo watched him move slowly down the aisle, kneel briefly, then enter the pew. They were virtually alone, the place was empty except for a few shawl-covered women in the front row and a priest who sped through the rite in mumbled Latin. The high ceilings held the church in soft gloom as the first sun touched the tops of the windows.

“You are very quick,” Ilya said, speaking in an undertone. He glanced at Khristo suspiciously. “Twenty-four hours,” he mused. “Have you considered a career in this business?”

“I want her back,” Khristo said, his voice tight with anger despite an attempt at neutrality. “Do what you like with me, but let her go.”

“Who?”

“She calls herself Aleksandra.”

“I'm sorry,” Ilya said, “I know nothing about this.”

“You lie,” Khristo said.

“No. Not true.”

“I may just cut your throat right here, Ilya. You're close enough to heaven for a speedy trip.”

“Khristo!”

“Blasphemy? You don't like it?”

“Stop it. I don't know what you're talking about.”

“To hell with you, then.” He stood, began to move down the pew toward the aisle.

“Khristo, wait, please,” Ilya called in a loud whisper.

He remained standing, but moved no farther.

“They are outside. All over the place. They'll cut you down.”

“In front of a church? In the street in broad daylight?”

“Yes, of course. Just like Myagin.”

“Good. You'll die first.”

“You think they care?”

Khristo sat down again and shook his head in disbelief. “You feel no shame, Ilya. How do you do it? ”

“Don't attack me, Khristo. I am trying to help you. Fold up your scales of justice and put them away and don't make judgments. I know nothing of this Aleksandra, but I promise to do whatever I'm able to do. There are so many of us, you see, each one under orders, and it is all compartmentalized, so one doesn't always know—”

“Enough! We're here to bargain …”

“We are not. There is no bargain.”

“Then what?”

“Give us Myagin's murderer, Khristo.”

“First the girl.”

Ilya gestured
no
and closed his eyes for a moment. “Please,” he said gently.

“Omaraeff,” Khristo said.

“Who is he?”

“The headwaiter at Brasserie Heininger. A Bulgarian.”

“For God's sake, why?”

“I don't know. Patriotism, perhaps. There is a chance the British are involved.”

“And you? Are you involved?”

“Marginally, Ilya. I did a small favor, then I walked away from it.”

“You didn't like the plan?”

“No, Ilya, no. I had something. For the first time in my life, just living like a plain man. Working at a job. Coming home to a woman. Nothing I did mattered at all. It was a joy, Ilya. Incomprehensibly a joy.”

“I am sorry.”

“Can you get her out?”

“I don't know. You remember how it is—all blind passages. But I swear to you I will try. I have friends, I'm owed favors. But I must be discreet.”

“Can I walk out of here?”

“No. I must leave first. Then you will be left alone.”

He thought about the signal, its simplicity. All Ilya had to do was let him go first, and he would be dead in a few seconds. “God help you, Ilya,” he said.

“Let me help you first. If this Omaraeff is pressed, will he sing your name?”

“A certainty.”

“Very well. That I can fix.”

“I don't care.”

“So you say, but I want you alive. For the other …”

“You must,” Khristo said, pleading.

Ilya nodded, looked at Khristo for a moment, then stood. “Good-bye, my friend,” he said and offered his hand.

Khristo did not take it.

Ilya shrugged, tucked
L'Humanité
beneath his arm, and walked up the aisle.

He saw them as he left the church—some of them. One in a car. Another reading a newspaper in the little park that surrounded the church. A tourist couple—at seven in the morning!—taking pictures of the Seine on the other side of the
quai
. His picture too, no doubt. As he turned north, a car pulled out of a parking space and trailed him. It was the battered Simca that had appeared one night in early spring as he walked home. He remembered the driver, drunk and grinning as he aimed the car up the middle of the street. They had, he realized, been with him for a long time.

How long? Had Vladi Z., his companion in the internment camp, been one of them? If so, they had been
running
him, an unknowing provocateur, since the day he left Spain. And he had fled from Madrid after a telephone call from none other than Ilya Goldman. Yet Yaschyeritsa's threats had been real enough. Or maybe not. Had they tried to panic him that far back?

A bullet-headed thug, with pale hair sheared to a bristle, swung out of a doorway and matched his pace. All sorts of specialists, Ilya had said, were now operating in Paris. The city would be crawling with them. He knew that NKVD search brigades, the sort of units that descended on suspicious activity in the villages, could be ten thousand strong. Not that they would try anything like that in France, but they had people in abundance and they used them abundantly.

He wanted to go to the bookstore where he had met Aleksandra, and he wanted to go alone, so he lost the cars by taking the Métro for two stops. That left him with Bullet-head and a fat-faced man in the Moscow version of a business suit. They stayed with him as he wandered around the back of the Fifth—the university quarter—among students hurrying to early class at the various
facultés
of the Sorbonne scattered through the district. He entered one of the classroom buildings and moved through the corridors and up and down the staircases in a tight press of humanity. When he finally left the building, Fat-face was gone. Perhaps he had given the whole thing up, Khristo thought, humiliated by student derision at his colossal suit, and defected to the registrar. Khristo glanced behind him—not even deigning to use the standard shop-window-as-mirror—and saw that Bullet-head was sweating up a storm, the last man left. A passenger got out of a nearby taxi and Khristo waved it down. Then watched through the rear window as the NKVD man ran in frantic circles looking for another. He rode three blocks, paid the driver, and stood back in a doorway as Bullet-head sailed by in his own taxi, terrified, surely, that such an expense would not be approved by his bosses.

Later that morning, Khristo stood in the bookstore, browsing among the thick, uncut volumes on surrealism and Marx. On the far wall was a poster, in livid red and black, celebrating the Republican effort in the Spanish war. There were stark crosses above graves and a shadowed face of great determination and strength looking into the near distance. In fiery letters, lines from the poet John Cornford were spread across the paper. Cornford, a poet and Marxist from Cambridge, had died at twenty-one, a machine-gunner in one of the international brigades. “Nothing is certain, nothing is safe,” the lines read. “Everything dying keeps a hungry grip on life / Nothing is ever born without screaming and blood.”

He watched the clerks in their blue smocks, moving about the store. How had Aleksandra fitted into this milieu? Her politics, he knew, were the politics of survival, her own survival. Larger questions were not germane—theories bored her; passions belonged in bed, not on the speaker's platform. Her absence stabbed him suddenly, and he said her name silently and dropped a book back onto a table.

“Captain Markov?”

At that name—his cover in Spain—he froze.

Turned slowly to the source of the voice and found Faye Berns. His first impression of her was long hair, washed and shining, and jade-colored eyes, lit up with recognition, meeting his own. On second glance, he saw that her face was sallow and exhausted, that life had not been easy.