They kicked down the door some twenty minutes later—about the time it took to drive from Gaylord's to the Calle de Victoria. Maltsaev and three assistants, with several more waiting in cars below. The radio was playing jazz and there were cards lying about on a small table and a half bottle of Spanish gin and ashtrays full of cigarettes. One of the men silently unplugged the radio and carried it down to the car. Another one found some women's clothing from America, and he too left. When his comrade in the automobile saw that he went up himself, but there wasn't much left—a combination lock and he didn't know the combination, but he took it anyhow, perhaps it could be traded. Maltsaev went to the telephone but the cord had been sliced in two. Señora Tovar, the janitor's wife, was brought up the marble stairs with her arm bent nearly double behind her back. She cursed them all the way. These tenants were Fifth Columnists, she was told. But she knew better. Told Maltsaev to let her go or the women of Madrid would hound him to his grave. He nodded briefly and his men released her. They went up to the roof and found Félix and beat him up a little, but he didn't seem to know much of anything. At last, when they'd removed everything they wanted, they tore the apartment to pieces, but found nothing. Maltsaev and one of his men were the last to leave. “Too bad,” he said. The man nodded in agreement. “One has to learn, of course, who warned them. General Bloch will want someone.”
“Perhaps his sublieutenant, Lubin,” the man suggested.
“A logical choice,” Maltsaev said. “Flies for Yaschyeritsa.”
“What?” the man asked.
Maltsaev dismissed him with a wave of the hand. Such idiots one had to work with in this profession. At least the other one, Kulic, the one in the mountains, would be well fixed. He'd made sure of that. The night's work wasn't entirely wasted. Now for Lubin. The family was powerful, but that could be overcome with a confession. He'd get that in a hurry, he was sure.
They could go west to Portugal. The Russians would not expect that because it meant crossing battle lines, then working their way, by bluff or stealth, through hundreds of miles of Nationalist-held countryside. They could go south, through Republican territory, and buy passage on a boat across the Mediterranean to Tangiers, a French possession. They could go northeast, to Port-Bou, the Pyrenees crossing point to southwestern France. But this mountain pass was Republican Spain's only major overland border access and would be subject to exceptionally heavy surveillance. Crossing the Pyrenees on the smugglers' routes was not appealing—too many travelers were never heard of again when they attempted that route.
The Russians would use the telephone—the system was operated on contract by American personnel from American Telephone and Telegraph and worked well, for both sides, throughout the war—to alert NKVD units throughout the country, but both Khristo and Andres doubted they would have sufficient time to activate Republican forces. They also doubted the Russians would tell their allies that intelligence officers had gone missing.
They decided to travel north. Khristo had overheard, at Gay-lord's, that the Spaniards were arming fishing boats in Bilbao and using them to bring food into Spain from French coastal ports. Bilbao was two hundred miles away, it would take all night, but the fastest way out of Spain was the best.
Dawn found them still trying to get out of Madrid.
It was a night of madness in the streets. Buildings unaccountably on fire, fire trucks skidding on streets wet with a slow, persistent rain that had started at dusk. They tried the Gran Via but found it blocked by Russian tanks brought up into battery position, their steel sides shiny in the rain, engines muttering and backfiring. Some streets were blocked by refugee campsites—tarpaulins or rain capes rigged upright with broomsticks to keep out the rain. Khristo saw a couple making love under a blanket on a brass bed in a house made of wooden crates. On one of these streets they hit a cat. Khristo slowed instinctively, then realized they could not afford to stop and stepped on the accelerator. When it was almost dawn, they were forced to halt at an intersection as private cars being used as ambulances sped past, coming from the direction of University City. The drivers rang cowbells, mounted on the roof, by pulling on a rope. While they were stopped, an old man approached the car. He wore a formal business suit, with vest decorously buttoned, and carried a tightly furled umbrella on his forearm. His beard was clipped to a precise triangle and a pair of pince-nez sat squarely on the bridge of his nose. He looked, Khristo thought, like a professor of Greek and Latin.
He peered in the window and greeted them as brothers and sisters in freedom. “I have been to war tonight,” he said, “and I have been wounded.” He half turned and Khristo could see blood seeping from a small wound at the back of his neck. “So,” the man said cheerfully, “it's the hospital for me!” He saluted them with his free hand and disappeared around a corner. A little later they saw, they thought, one of the infamous Phantom Cars, packed with militiamen who arrested and executed suspected Fifth Columnists at night. A rifle barrel protruded from a rear window. Then, when they were almost out of the city, a Checa unit on bicycles stopped them.
Khristo chatted with their leader, holding the Tokarev below the sightline of the driver's window. He was free. It had come slowly, but when comprehension overtook him his spirit soared with excitement. It was as though a hand had let go of the back of his neck and for the first time in years he could raise his head and see the horizon. So they would not take him back.
The Checa man at the window was very slow—he had all the time in the world. But Khristo drew an invisible line for him and waited for him to cross it and die. Yaschyeritsa would get no more satisfaction from him than dancing on his grave. The man talked on and on. It was interesting about his job that he got to meet so many different kinds of people who walked about in this world, who would have ever imagined that on this rainy night in November he would engage in conversation with a citizen of Soviet Russia, now that was why he found this job so very interesting. Finally Andres leaned across from the passenger seat and whispered that they had only an hour to spend with these girls here before they had to return to the fighting. The man's face slid gradually into an immense leer. He winked, stood back from the car, and waved them through. Lascivious shouts of “Viva la Rusia!” followed them down the street.
For a time they traveled on the main road to Burgos. But they began to see men in suits standing by cars parked beside the road, so they moved onto the narrow lanes that went through the villages. In some nameless place in the vast wheat heartland north of Madrid the car stopped. They opened the hood and looked inside, but none of them knew anything about cars. The engine gave off a blast of heat that shimmered the air above it. It ticked in the silence and smelled of burnt oil. A small man appeared from nowhere, riding a bicycle with an infant in the basket. They spoke to him in Spanish but he did not understand Spanish, or perhaps he was deaf. He pointed to his ears again and again. He smiled at them. Showed them his baby. Then, almost as an afterthought, he reached into the engine and did something to something and signaled Khristo to start the car. It started. The man refused to take money, waved to them as they moved off. In the car they made plans for what they would do in Paris. What they would eat. Where they would go. Madrid, it began to be clear once they were away from it, had been a prison. Soon they would be in Burgos, it wasn't so far from there to Bilbao. They would get on a fishing boat and sail away to freedom. The car stopped again, on a tiny road bounded by uncut wheat rotting in the fields.
There was nothing for miles. Khristo's hand shook as he raised the hood. He wanted to throttle the engine hoses until the Citroën bowed to his will. This had never happened to him before, the car had always run perfectly. They decided to walk, to march crosscountry taking only pistols and whatever else would fit in their pockets. They started out, Andres sang a song to get them moving along. Suddenly, a German spotter plane appeared and swooped low to have a look at them. Faye waved to it and smiled. It disappeared over the horizon and they ran back to the car—some cover was preferable to being caught in the open. The plane returned and buzzed the car, then left. Khristo, for no particular reason, turned the ignition key one last time for luck. The Citroën roared to life and he very nearly wept with relief.
At dusk, they worked their way around the outskirts of Burgos. Found a shack with an ancient, hand-operated gas pump, and bought fuel from a suspicious peasant woman in black who overcharged them mercilessly. They had to pool their remaining pesos to pay her—Khristo had been kept on a small living allowance, most of his NKVD pay banked safely for him awaiting his return to Moscow. The woman watched all this with an eye like a hunting hawk. She went into the shack to retrieve some coins for change, and Khristo and Andres whispered briefly about doing away with her. They saw her watching them through a window. Andres looked about and discovered there were no telephone lines going into the shack, then realized suddenly that all she wanted to do was steal their change. They drove away without it. The road began to climb through forests and the Citroën stuttered and threatened to stall. Khristo pushed the gas pedal to the floor; the car faltered, then roared ahead. Bad gasoline, they thought, watered. Late at night they came to the Río Nervión, which ran eight miles to the Atlantic. They easily found the fishing boats, which had 101 mm fieldpieces mounted fore and aft. Andres got out of the car and wandered down the street of dockside bars, sailors' haunts with anchors and sextants and curling waves painted on their signs. Khristo, Faye and Renata stayed in the car, too tired to talk, the burst of energy that had seen them through the long night had waned suddenly, replaced by depression and exhaustion. Khristo time and again caught himself fading out. “Where do you suppose he is?” Faye asked at one point.
Khristo shrugged. Told himself to keep watch, knowing how vulnerable they were. The American girl fell asleep, her head sliding along the upholstery until he felt its weight settle on his upper arm. In her sleep she turned slightly toward him, until the place where her mouth rested grew warm with her breath. He remained very still and fancied he could hear, in the rise and fall of her breathing, the progress of her dreams.
They were all asleep when a hand banged hard on the window. Khristo came to his senses in terror, then saw it was Andres, with a sea captain. He didn't look like a sea captain, he was wearing a suit and tie. He had gotten married that morning, Andres explained. Khristo got out of the car and went with them to a bar down a little alley between warehouses—moving the Tokarev to the side pocket of his jacket and keeping his hand on it. The bar was only twelve feet long, with five stools. They drank a glass of wine and made their offer: the Citroën and two Degtyaryova machine guns in exchange for passage to France. Yes, good, the man said. He could take two of them for that. Which two would it be? He asked too much, they protested. He thought not. The Russians had come around, he explained, looking for them. The license plate and automobile were just as they had described. He had, this very day, become a married man. He now had responsibilities. And it was his wedding night. If he was to spend it on the high-running sea of the Gulf of Vizcaya instead of the high-running sea of the marriage bed, he must be well paid. The three of them returned to the car, Andres suggesting that the women carried extra pesos. Khristo saw his game without prompting. They would put a gun in this one's ear and solve the problem that way. Back at the car, they told Renata and Faye about the captain's demand. Andres suggested that the two women should go by fishing boat, he and Khristo would find a guide and use the smugglers' trails across the Pyrenees. Faye took a little watch off her wrist and held it up to the captain. He took it in his hand. Listened to it tick. It was Russian, she explained, brought to America by her grandmother. All that time, she said, it worked perfectly. The captain agreed to take them and put the watch in his pocket.
They reached France the following day, wading ashore at the fishing village of St.-Jean-de-Luz. Shoes in hand, they walked up a narrow beach of brown pebbles to a low seawall. There was a policeman sitting on the wall, he had taken his hat off and set it on a page of newspaper to keep it from the tar, and was eating an apple with a small knife, and he arrested them.
Marquin and his three compatriots very nearly did reach Portugal. Their method was simple enough. They walked only at night. They walked near the road—so as not to lose their way—but never on it. They stole only vegetables, never chickens, to keep local anger to a minimum. A few missing vegetables, they knew, were not worth an encounter with the authorities. A mile short of the Portuguese border, their luck ran out. The army was running things in that region, and they were discovered sleeping under a bridge. The first interrogation was superficial, but in time they were taken by truck to a unit of Nationalist intelligence and there placed under the care of a Moroccan corporal named Bahadi, who specialized in getting answers to any and all questions. Marquin lasted the longest, about an hour. When the officer in charge was satisfied that he had everything he could get, they were taken out and shot in a courtyard. Never, following the session with Bahadi, were four men happier to die.
Thus the story of Kulic's mercy made its way to Nationalist intelligence headquarters in Toledo, and was there submitted for analysis to Oberstleutnant Otto Eberlein, one of the unit's Abwehr advisers. Eberlein, recruited by the NKVD in 1934 under motivation of political idealism, passed the information to his contact in Toledo, a nurse in a podiatrist's office—by 1938 he had surely the most pampered feet in Spain—and from there it soon enough reached Colonel General Yadomir Bloch, who called Maltsaev and told him to take care of the matter. Maltsaev simply moved the appropriate information back through the system to Nationalist intelligence: a time, a date, the name of the town—Estillas—then had Madrid Base radio Kulic and assign the mission.
From the beginning, the attack on the police station at Estillas went badly. He had two men sick with high fever and dysentery and they had to be left at the deserted village. Which meant he was down to fourteen souls. And the ammunition situation was beginning to pinch. Madrid Base had been informed by radio of the executions and sickness, and the need for resupply, but had confirmed the original order. Someone, somewhere, apparently thought that the Estillas police station was a critical target, and his was not to reason why. Still, a daylight attack. And with reduced forces. And with morale, after “justice” had been dealt to the four POUM traitors, at its lowest ebb. He was close, at one point, to canceling the mission and accepting in return whatever Madrid decided to do to him. Only one factor kept him from that. An initial reconnaissance persuaded him that Estillas was a rather easy place to attack. Just behind the police station lay the town cemetery, a place frequented only on Sundays, when the townspeople came out to place bunches of flowers on the gravesites. Scheduled to strike on a Wednesday afternoon, the raiding party could move up close before making themselves known.
They got as far as the cemetery, then all hell broke loose. Somebody knew they were coming. Because once the unit was in place, well spread out and awaiting his signal, the mortars and machine guns started in. And the mortars had been zeroed in. Accurately. Betrayed, he thought. The first shells raised enormous dirt plumes in the cemetery, smashing headstones to splinters and blowing the dead out of their graves—a fountain of whitened bones rising in the air, then raining down on the heads of the guerrillas. The sergeant, a brave man, stood up and waved the men forward. Machine-gun fire stitched him across the belly and he died howling. Kulic fired twice, at nothing in particular, then a blast concussion picked him up and slammed him senseless against the earth. His mind swayed back and forth, a sickening, dizzy rise and fall from one part of consciousness to another, and he found himself crawling. He meant not to be taken alive, felt around for his rifle but it had disappeared. He heard some of his men weeping, managed to get to one knee before the next shell came in, felt the shrapnel take him all along the left side, knew his left eye was blinded, knew nothing more after that.
In Catalonia, some way inland from the ancient spice city of Tarragona, in the valley of the Río Ebro, lay the village of San Ximene. In the late summer of 1938, a company of Nationalist infantry moved into the town and took it without a shot being fired. By then, the conquest of the province was no longer an issue, and nobody wanted to be the last to die. As the troops marched in, a little winded because the village stood high above the road, a few people lined the narrow lane, waved tiny Monarchist flags, and gave the cheer heard now all across the country. “Han pasado,” they called out. “Han pasado!” They have passed. Don Teodosio and Doña Flora and Miguelito the chauffeur were ceremoniously released from captivity. Both mayors, Avena from the PSUC and Quinto of the POUM, were ceremoniously shot. There wasn't much else to do, so the captain ordered his men forward. They had liberated San Ximene, and he felt they ought to go on, to Calaguer or Santoval, before nightfall. Marching out of the village in good order, they passed through an orchard of fig trees. A sergeant was sent to reconnoiter, but there was no fruit to be had. The sergeant was a country man, and told the captain that the trees had not been pruned. Branches had broken off under the weight of the fruit, disease had spread into the trunks from the open wood, and that was the end of the San Ximene figs.
“STEADY ON!”
“Dear boy. Trod on your paw, have I?”
“Damn near.”
“I am sorry. Can't see a thing with the lights off. Candles are lovely in a ballroom, but they do keep one in shadow.”
“Bloody Frenchies. If it ain't a knife 'n' fork they can't work it.”
“Not the power, actually. One of Winnie's effects I think. Makes it funereal.”
“Mmm.”
“I'm Roger Fitzware.”
“Jimmy Grey. West Sussex Fitzwares, is it?”
“C'est moi.”
“Mmm. Been in Paris long?”
“Live here, actually, most of the time.”
“Do you. I'm just in from Cairo. Over at the Bristol.”
“How do you find it?”
“Service gone to hell, of course, and full of Americans.”
“In Cairo on business?”
“Little of everything, really.”
“Hot as ever?”
“Yes. Damned filthy too.”
“Dear old thing.”
“Not my sort of place, all those little brown men running about and stabbing each other.”
“Oh well. One puts up with the little brown men. For the sake of the little brown boys.”
“Mmm. Wouldn't know about that.”
“Ah, here's the lovely Ginger.”
“Roddy Fitzware! You promised to call—Who's this?”
“Ginger Pudakis, meet Jimmy Grey.”
“Delighted. Mmm. Yes, well, think I see somebody I know. Good to have met you, Fitzware.”
“See you.”
“Roddy! You are exceptionally bad. You terrified that poor man.”
“Oh well, it is Paris, after all.”
“Not here, my lamb. Here is a little corner of a foreign field, and that fellow, if I'm not mistaken, is something or other to Viscount Grey.”
“The 1914 man? ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our time.' That the one?”
“Yes.”
“The lamps are certainly out here.”
“Where's Mützi?”
“Home. In a great snit.”
“Oh Roddy, you mustn't be cruel.”
“Me! Ginger dear, I've been an absolute bishop, really I have. But he snuck out while I was having me nap, taxied off to Gabouchard and bought himself the most impossible tie. Couldn't let him wear it, could I, not to Winnie and Dicky's. Had a sunset. Some dreadful peachy pinky sort of thing they sold him. Poor Mützi and his filthy Boche taste, he can't help himself at all. When I left he was playing Mendelssohn on the Victrola and mumbling about Selbstmord or some such thing. Ending it all.”
“Too sad. All for a tie.”
“Told him not to get blood on the drapes.”
“You're a horrid man, you really are.”
“C'est moi. Care to step onto the balcony?”
“And what would you do on the balcony?”
“Think of something, dear girl.”
“You probably would.”
“Speaking of that, where's old Winnie and Dicky?”
“Grand entrance at midnight, one is told. From the ballroom elevator.”
“Too bad Mützi isn't here to see this, he quite loves the Teutonic style. Draped candles, urns with cypress, roses painted black. Nobody actually dead, is there?”
“Heavens no. On the stroke of midnight, Winnie Beale turns thirty-nine. It's a funeral for her youth.”
“Ah.”
“Really, one must love the Americans.”
“You married one, my dear, so you must. Whatever became of Mr. Pudakis?”
“In Chicago, as always. Where he does something with meat. Bloody old Europe didn't agree with poor Harry.”
“Hello! Something's up, the music's gone queer.”
“It's the funeral march. Is it? Yes, I think it is. Sounds a bit odd from a jazz band.”
“Speaking of odd, regardez the elevator.”
“Good God. Now that is courage.”
“Ain't it though? Throw yourself a birthday bash and make an entrance entirely bare-arsed. Bravo Winnie! Hurrah!”
“Well, not entirely bare-arsed. The hat is from Schiaparelli, my sweet, the pearls are Bulgari, and the little catch-me/fuck-me shoes are made by a little man in the Rue des Moulins.”
“Still, rather a decent set of flanks …”
“Now Roddy, don't be boring.”
“Tell me, dear girl, who's that hard-looking gent presiding over the salmon?”
“Him? You know him. It's Mario Thoeni, the tenor, though one wouldn't exactly say hard-looking …”
“Gawd not him. The waiter.”
“Oh who knows. Some dreadful Slav from Heininger. Winnie finds him decorative.”
“She's right, you know. He's quite thoroughly decorative.”
“Roddy Fitzware, you're not to poach!”
“Dear girl, wouldn't think of it.”
All his life he had handled tools, but this one had its own special set of perfections. It was made of silver, with a pleasing weight that sealed it to the hand, a broad filigree surface ending in a rounded point and a subtle edge of just the proper sharpness. He pressed it down through the pink flesh of the salmon—choosing a natural striation for the cut—deftly balanced the portion atop the server, then slid it neatly onto the maize-colored plate. With ceremony, he laid the server on a silver dish and took up a small ladle. He swirled it twice through the thick sauce diplomat—as though to banish some godlike impurity—then, from the left, drizzled a thin river to the salmon slice, paused to anoint the top with a decorative pool, as in a garden, then ran the river to a perfect delta on the other side of the plate, stopping just short of the thick gold banding. With a tiny silver trident, he fashioned a triangle of capers on the dryland north of the river, then, the dénouement, placed two black truffle “rocks” at the edge of the garden pool. White-gloved hand turned beneath the plate so that the intrusive thumb barely rode the edge, he proffered the masterwork, eyes down, speaking the words “Merci, madame” in a soft undertone.
That afternoon, carrying silver trays of hors d'oeuvres covered with brown paper upstairs to the kitchen that served the ballroom, he had observed the Beales' chef preparing the sauce diplomat. Fish stock, cream—too thick to pour, it had to be spooned from the bottle—lobster butter, brandy and cayenne. Now, in a crystal bowl by his right hand, the sauce's combined scents drifted up and tormented him. Normally, when he worked at the Brasserie Heininger, he could manage a discreet sample somewhere between kitchen and dining room, but here one was in the public eye.
For a moment, there was no one to serve—a group of rosy-cheeked men favored the roast—and he gazed out into the crowd with the particular dead-eyed, unseeing servant's stare he'd been taught, suggesting that only the ritual of the salmon could bring him to life. Yet he did see.
A clever play. Written out moment to moment by the guests themselves as they moved about the polished black linoleum in candlelight. Each one, he thought, achieved a sort of glossy sainthood in a special and individual way. Yes, there were trembling hands and bulging eyes and mighty bosoms and shiny pates. No different than Vidin, really. Yet here, by way of some magical process these people had thought up, the common pranks life played upon the body mattered less. The old ladies had big rings and naughty eyes. The fat men were highly polished and told jokes. The chinless girls laughed and shook their little breasts. The wispy young men with wispy mustaches leaned over cleverly and seemed watchful and intelligent. Thank God, he thought, for Omaraeff. Who had brought him to such spectacles.
He served a plumpish, fair-haired man who seemed lost and friendless and on his way to being very drunk in a very depressing way. Then a tall dowager with heavily rouged cheeks who glared down at him with apparent anger. That he would dare to serve her? Perhaps. These were, for the most part, English people, a tribe that swathed its rituals in mystery and seemed perpetually annoyed at the world, offended, perhaps, at humanity's never-ending attempts to discover what they wanted.
He did not care. He had only salmon to offer, and sauce diplomat. The American woman, Winnie Beale, floated through the room, principally nude and entirely without shame. Clothed only in social position. Which, curiously, sufficed. He had served her table at Heininger several nights in a row—during the opera season, late suppers at Heininger were virtually compulsory—and Omaraeff had informed him that he was now to work at private parties in the Beale mansion on the Rue de Varenne.
Informed him on other subjects as well. Told him, for instance, that Winifred Beale had in fact begun life as Ethel Glebb, daughter of a trolley motorman in a smoky Ohio town on a lake. Worked as a telephone operator. Contrived to meet, and ultimately marry, Dicky Beale of Syracuse, the heir to an immense fortune acquired by his grandfather through the manufacture of stovepipe.
Omaraeff knew everything.
Had thus prepared him for the inevitable grappling match, precisely foreseen and described. The summons to the house. The taxi ride across a rainy Paris afternoon with a tray of langoustines on his lap. The maid's direction to “bring them upstairs.” The small library that overlooked the Rodin gardens. The flowered cotton shift so accidentally open. The sly look, the giggle, the teasing wordplay of a young girl. The balletic sweep into his arms. The rolling around on the Oriental carpet. “Meet the attack,” Omaraeff had said, “respond to each sortie, but do not advance. Should she wish the cannon rolled out and fired, let her see to it, but do not permit yourself to be provoked. A single sign of passion on your part, dear Khristo, and you will work here no more.” Those instructions he had followed to the letter. She was, up close, frightfully plain. Her face apparently beaten into neutrality over the years, so oiled, patted, painted, baked, kneaded and creamed that it ultimately had neither expression nor feature. It had become a blank canvas, to be turned into whatever she wished. The act was not consummated. She let him up. Kissed him like a fond aunt. He became again the waiter, smoothed his hair, busied himself for a moment with the arrangement of langoustines on the tray, then returned to the restaurant by Métro, pocketing the cab fare.
Some of the guests were dancing. A clickety-clack step to the fast foxtrot produced by the band, four American Negroes who performed most nights at Le Hot Club. The leader, chopping rhythmically at the white piano with thick fingers, was called Toledo Red, his trademark, an unlit stub of cigar, clamped in his teeth as he played. The dancers leaned their upper bodies together, eyes vague, flopping about like unstrung puppets. Khristo watched for a time, seeming to look through them, in fact studying their dance in the smoked-glass mirrors that lined the walls. He noticed that the drapes—black for this occasion, normally violet—had fallen open at one of the tall windows, and he thought he could see snowflakes drifting slowly past the glass. It was the last week in March.
“Hallo there, Nick.”
He snapped to attention. “Madame,” he said, bowing slightly.
“A bit of salmon?”
“Bien sûr, madame.”
He took up the silver salmon knife. She was so pale and pretty, this one, like a movie star, a fragile flower in the last decline, dying in the final reel. She was often at his table at Heininger and, as the champagne bottles emptied—“More shampers, Nick!” they would call out—her cheeks blushed red and she became excited and clapped her hands and shrieked with delight at anything anybody said.
“Merci, madame.”
“Thanks ever so much.”
Nick.
At the internment camp near Perpignan, where the French had detained him while the socialist government chased its tail in circles over what was to be done about the Spanish war, Khristo had decided to become a Russian. He was alone at the camp; his three fellow fugitives had fled into the night, having decided that safety lay in ignorance of each other's intentions. Renata and Faye Berns had been released almost immediately. Andres had been held for a day, then produced a Greek passport from the lining of his jacket and was freed.
But Khristo was officially without documents—the Russian passport with the nom de guerre Markov was nothing but a danger to him and now lay beneath four inches of earth in a Spanish field—so was designated by French officials a Stateless Person. A Russian, he believed, could more easily lose himself in a city like Paris. A Bulgarian would stand out; the Parisian émigré community from that country was not large. But the plan did not work. The League of Nations official who finally processed him, in the last week of 1936, was a Czech, and Khristo dared not try to fool him. Thus he left the camp under his brother's name, Nikko, and the last name Petrov, common in Bulgaria. The English patrons of the restaurant had shortened Nikko to Nick.
The camp had been a vile place. The internees spent their days shuffling around the barbed-wire perimeter or playing cards—the deck made of torn strips of paper—for cigarettes. They huddled around stoves made of punched-out petrol tins and plotted endlessly in a stew of languages. After more than a month of it, Khristo had thought seriously of escaping. The Senegalese troops who guarded them sometimes did not bring water all day long and the inmates were tortured by thirst, pleading through the wire while the guards stared at them curiously. Sometimes a gate was left open—a clear invitation to escape. If one were caught, however, deportation back to Spain was automatic.
Yet he'd had, in the camp, one great stroke of luck. He'd met a Russian called Vladi Z., a soldier of fortune from an émigré family in Berlin, former harnessmakers to the czar's St. Petersburg household. Vladi Z. had worked for the Comintern, smuggling guns into Spain through the mountains. He'd taken to putting a bit of money aside for himself, but greed overtook his sense of propriety and he'd been caught at it. Snapped up by the Checa in Barcelona, he had managed to escape, bribing his guards with gold secreted “where the sun never shines.” After some days spent wandering helplessly in the Pyrenees, he had crossed into France at Port-Bou with a group of American journalists. There he claimed German citizenship, but he had shed his passport in fear of the Checa and thus was interned. No matter, he confided to Khristo, his family in Berlin would soon have him out. “You must go to Paris,” he said, “even the devil won't find you there.” He had assumed, without being told, that Khristo was on the run. “In Paris,” he continued, “one sees Omaraeff. A Bulgarian like yourself. A great man. Headwaiter at the famous Brasserie Heininger. Tell him Vladi Z. sent you and give him my greatest respects. And if, perchance, you are some provocateur chekist piece of filth, then we, we, you understand, will have you in the ground by sundown.” On the train north, Khristo's heart had pounded with excitement. Watching the winter countryside roll past, he touched the Nansen passport in his pocket a hundred times and hoped and dreamed more than he'd ever dared. Paris. Paris.
The song ended; the dancers broke apart and applauded themselves. Toledo Red shifted the cigar stub to the other corner of his mouth and banged out the introduction to “The Sheik of Araby.” There were squeals of anticipation from the dance floor as the saxophone player, a great fat fellow with a gold-toothed grin, draped one of the Beales' monogrammed damask napkins over his head in a make-believe burnoose. Winnie Beale had reappeared, after her dramatic entrance, dressed in emerald crêpe de chine and now began dancing her own version of the desert slave girl—Valentino's beloved in a Balenciaga gown.
She gave Khristo an affectionate leer as she swept past him. Strange, he thought, these people of the night who glittered in the world of Heininger and the Beale mansion. Mood-swept, arrogant, insecure, yet at times unbelievably kind. They were the gods and goddesses of this city, from the smoke-filled jazz dens on the Rive Gauche to the chauffeured caravans that moved through the Bois de Boulogne at dawn. Yet they took a curious, backhanded pride in knowing a simple waiter. He had become, of all things, a minor feature of this world. Nick.
Stranger still, he cared for them. He was younger than most, yet they played at being his children. “Nick, my button has torn loose!” “Be a good fellow, Nick, and help Madame with her lobster.” And even, “Oh Nick, I feel so blue.” They had, it seemed to him, bad dreams—bad dreams they did not understand. Premonitions. And they sensed, somehow, that he did understand. That he knew what was coming. And that, when it came, he would remember their affection for him, that he would protect them. They would never admit that they were the Jews of Berlin, the aristocracy of Russia, the wealthy Spaniards trapped in Madrid and forced to flee to the Finnish embassy, yet, deep down, they sensed that the world as they'd known it had only a little more time to run.
“Dear boy?”
Again caught in reverie, he was startled, and looked directly at the man standing before him. He was on the short side and quite handsome, with thick, reddish-brown hair swept across a noble forehead. His eyes at first seemed exhausted—dark and shadowed—then Khristo realized that makeup had been used to create the illusion.
Looking down quickly, Khristo reached for the salmon server.
“Not necessary, dear boy, I've had me supper.” He handed over a business card.
“Give us a call, will you sometime? I'm a photographer, in a sort of way. Like to take your portrait.”
Then he was gone.
A fine, dry snow was falling on Paris as he walked home from the party. It dusted the cobblestones pale and sugary and hardened the yellow beams of the streetlamps into severe triangles—like a painted backdrop, he thought, for a street scene in a nightclub act. He watched a boulevard turn silver before his eyes, and some trick of the light made the spires of the churches seem disconnected, floating free in the windless night air. All for his hungry eyes, he thought, all this. He had only to open his heart a little and the city breathed itself into him, sent him climbing in a perfect, pointless, nighttime elation to a height that no sorrow could reach. A pair of policemen, rubber capes black and shining, rode past on their bicycles. A window of the Hôtel St. Cyr squeaked open and a young man in gartered shirtsleeves stared up at the sky. Framed in the oval window of a taxi, idling at a corner of the Rue de Rennes, a man and a woman kissed lightly—lips barely in contact—then moved apart and touched each other's faces with the tips of their fingers. At the all-night café on the Rue des Écoles he saw a group of well-rouged old ladies, bundled into the collars of their Persian lamb coats, gathered at a table near the bar. Each one had a tiny dog on her lap or in the crook of her arm. From the way the women leaned across the table, they seemed like conspirators in a plot. It was, after all, well past three in the morning. What brought them together like this? The Affair of the Little Dogs, he thought. The oddest conspiracy of 1937, a year of conspiracies.
But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. Amours. Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal, they were the true life and business of a place where money was never enough and power always drained away. And, since the first days of his time there, he had had his own secrets.