It was a long walk. From the Rue de Varenne in the Seventh Arrondissement, the heart of Paris fashion, to the rented room on a street of Jewish tailors and little shops that made eyeglass frames, out past the Place République, not far from the Père Lachaise cemetery. It took him about two hours, usually, though he could make it last somewhat longer than that and sometimes did. He was accompanied, for a time, by Marko, the bartender, and his nephew Anton, who washed the crystal and the china service. All three carried parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string—though Khristo's was rather heavier than the others'—the “extras” of the waiter's profession. The sous chef had done the wrapping in the manner of pâtisserie clerks, who could fold paper into cones of sufficient strength that an elaborate pastry would survive a child's trip to the store. Nestled inside the packets were slightly crumbled slices of pâté of wild duck in a game jelly, white asparagus spears, and thick cuts of tenderloin beef from the Limousin, carved to the English taste. In addition, Marko kept a bottle below the bar to receive the remnants of the brandy service. The Beales had provided their guests with an Armagnac, a select vintage of 1896, and all three took sustenance from it now and again as they walked.
They judged the party quite successful. Not a single fistfight and only two slaps—reportedly of political, not romantic, origin and therefore hardly worth discussion. The tulip-shaped elevator remained cranky, but no horrified shouts from between-floor guests had had to be attended to. Nobody jumped out a window, or set fire to the drapes, or tried to drink champagne by pouring it over female undergarments and squeezing them out like Spanish wine sacks. It was the Americans who drank from shoes, under the curious impression that romantic Europeans did such things. The chef, according to Anton, who worked in the kitchen, had been at his very best. Whistling and winking, he had performed with casual speed, directing his staff like a lion tamer in good humor. And hardly a curse all night long. This unusual sweetness of temper was attributed by the Beale staff to his near ceaseless screwing of one of Madame's maids, a recent development. But which one? The shy little redhead from Quimper? Or the fulsome Italian, Tomasina, with haunches that could hurl a man into the air? Speaking of which, what of the naked Beale woman? Would the society columns consider it thrilling or déclassé? “I served her champagne,” Marko said, in his sturdy Slavic French, “and her left tit looks toward Prague.”
Together, they walked nearly the length of the Boulevard St. Germain, then Marko and Anton headed for their rooms by the Gare Austerlitz, the railroad terminal, while Khristo used the Pont de Sully to cross the river. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would take the Pont Marie. Well-learned instincts forbade the use of the same route night after night. One varied daily habits at every opportunity, one made prediction of time and place as difficult as possible, one did not, after all, shed Arbat Street quite so easily. His journey took him through the Marais, the Jewish quarter, a good place to quicken the footsteps. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew darker, the streets of the Marais seemed to him more and more like a maze, a trap. At the northern border of the district he paused to warm up by the exhaust vents of a baker—who had fired his pine bough ovens an hour earlier—then headed for home.
A battered little Simca crawled up the Rue du Chemin Vert behind him, rather too slowly for his taste, and he stepped into a doorway and let it go past—eventually viewing the absurdly besotted driver with some amusement. But one had to be alert. Do not forget everything, was the way he put it to himself. And he had not. He read the Russian émigré papers, like thousands of others, with a hopeful heart. To the east, the NKVD—in fact the entire Soviet apparat—was stinging itself to death like a tormented scorpion as Yezhov, the redheaded dwarf, rolled down purge upon purge. Good! Let them rip each other to pieces, he thought. Let them sink into the swamp of bureaucratic confusion until not a single file remained in place. The simple defection of a junior intelligence officer would drift endlessly down their lists to the bottom of a clerical sea. Or so he hoped—though in fact he knew them much better than that. He had changed the parting of his hair, grown a thick mustache (all the brasserie waiters in Paris had to be well furred in some fashion; it emphasized the sense of midnight deviltry the proprietors wished to encourage), and, with remorse, destroyed the clothing he'd worn in Spain. Now he had an old sheepskin jacket, bought at a marché aux puces on the outskirts of the city. Beyond that, there was fatalism. Refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany now came to Paris in a steady stream, he was but one among them. He worked hard at being Nick the waiter, hid his money behind a loose light fixture in the hallway outside his room, and kept all acquaintance—with the exception of the Omaraeff connection—emphatically casual. He didn't need much. He had his work, he had the city, and he had a great deal more than that.
In the room, he undressed slowly, then made sure the shutters were firmly closed. The window faced east and the pale light of the winter sunrise would leak in through the slats, creating a shadow light that seemed to him peaceful and timeless.
She was, as usual, pretending to sleep. But, if her eyes were closed, how did she sense the moment he was ready to enter the bed? Because it was, always, this very moment she chose to stretch and twist in such a way that she shaped her body for him in the softened outline of the blanket.
“Aleksandra?” He spoke softly, standing by the bed.
“I am sleeping,” she said, unbothered by this, or any other, contradictory statement.
He slid carefully between the sheets next to her. A moment later, just as sleep began to take him, her hand came visiting.
“You are moving in your sleep,” he whispered.
“I am having a dream.”
“Oh.”
“A terrible dream.”
“What of?”
“That certain things, indescribable things, are to happen to me, just at dawn, it is far too wicked even to describe … my heart beats …”
“Very well. You must go back to sleep.”
“Yes. You are right.”
“Aleksandra?”
“What?”
“It is dawn.”
“Oh no! Say it isn't!”
Who was she?
He was not entirely sure. Her passport gave her family name as Varin, probably French, possibly Russian, and she claimed it was not the true family name anyhow. What he did know was that she wanted to be a mystery to him, wished him to see her as a creature of the Paris night, a manifestation, without the claustrophobic bonds of family or nationality. It was self-conscious artifice, transparently so, but she refused to leave its shelter.
“Who are you, truly?” he'd asked more than once.
“Ah,” she'd say, triste as a nightclub singer, “if only one knew that sort of thing.”
She spelled her name in the Slavic form, implied exotic connections—emigrant communities in distant corners of Europe, Trieste perhaps—and claimed that her spirit, her psyche, was Russian. In support of such claims, she owned a few rich Russian curses that were occasionally hurled his way. She was small, waiflike, unsmiling, with a thick shag of muted blond hair that whipped her forehead when she shook her head and cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal. Her coloring he found strange—dark beneath pale—as though a shadow lived inside her. She had a hot temper, would go to war on the slightest provocation.
But there was also in her a peasant sharpness that he found very familiar, an echo of his part of the world. She could leave the room with a few sous and return with the most extraordinary amount of stuff. She spoke a tough Parisian street French—calling him “mec,” pal, when it suited her, in a hoarse, low voice—and bits and pieces of English she learned at the cinéma. Would surprise him with lines memorized from American movies in which men with pencil-thin mustaches dueled over business deals and won the heiress. “Now see here, Trumbull,” she would say, black beret pulled down over her mop head.
She had been born in the countryside, she said, somewhere in the South of France, but of a family, she claimed, from elsewhere. Arrived in Paris at sixteen, alone, without money, and survived. Her father, according to the time of day, had been a gangster, a poet, or a nobleman. She had never met him, she said, and had few memories of her mother—carried off by the influenza epidemic of 1919. She had been raised by an aunt, or rather, a woman who called herself aunt, or, perhaps, a woman who had known her aunt. None of her stories was ever told the same way twice and he finally gave it up—acknowledged inconsistency the only effective defense against a trained interrogator—and consigned her to the present moment, which was where she wanted to be in the first place.
He had met her in a bookstore where she worked, lost in a billowing blue smock. She had fierce little hands, and he could not take his eyes off them as they whisked piles of books into order. She challenged him—What are you looking at?—he met the challenge. She demanded coffee. They went to a café. He waited for her after work. Eventually, they returned to his room. The following day, she appeared at his door with a cardboard suitcase. “I have brought a few things,” she'd said.
She had, in her own way, taught him to be her lover. Using for instruction a great range of pouts and swoons and sly looks, attacks and retreats, an entire ragbag of stratagems. She teased him until he growled, then ran away. But not too far. Led him, subtly, to such special silky places as made her sing and showed him how, by example, to play lovers' games.
She seduced him. Sometimes this way, sometimes that. With rainy-day melancholy or by getting absurdly drunk on two glasses of wine. “Did we do something vile? I swear I don't remember.” She was clever at being “naughty” and making him “mad.” Sometimes, pretending to immense modesty, she let him have a peek at something he wasn't supposed to see—quite by accident, of course, a stolen glimpse. She played at being his captive, squeaking for mercy. Or at being his captor, in the voice of a disciplinarian schoolteacher. At times, she was partial to costumes. Not intentional ones, it just happened that he would discover her in garter belt and silk stockings while she was looking for her earrings. Other times, he would get in bed to find her in the chaste cotton shift of a schoolgirl, on which occasion she chose to address him as uncle. She taught him this and she taught him that until at last it dawned on him that the only way a man ever becomes a lover is at the hands of a woman.
Of her former lovers, whoever they might have been, he had no time to be jealous. The world seemed intent on rushing off its cliff, so, like everyone else, he lived for the moment and hung on tight. The lipstick grew crimson, hairdos were twisted about in bizarre shapes, and in some dresses a woman simply could not sit down. Affairs begun on Friday were over by Wednesday. And every woman in the world seemed to want him, sensing, he guessed, what went on in the little room. At Heininger, the screechy English girls pressed apartment keys into his hand, absolutely bent on having it off with the working class, and an evil-looking Slav at that. He smiled wistfully and returned the keys, regret for the lost opportunity showing clearly in his expression, hoping that such chivalry would spare him their anger.
If he was tempted at all, it was the French women who caught his attention, especially the ones a few years older than he. It was the single glance on the street that undid him, gone in the very last instant before it actually meant anything. His eyes would roam hungrily after them as they trailed their wondrous perfume away down the avenue, leaving him to sniff great nosefuls of Parisian air. What was that?
But Aleksandra, who smelled like soap, or lemons, or someone who had just been in the hot sun, was more than enough for him, so he prayed at one church only and, soon enough, woke to discover that love had got him.
In Vidin, the March wind blew in hard off the river, rippling the surface of the water and flattening the reeds that grew by the wooden dock. A few snow patches remained on the dirt street that ran past the waterfront shacks of the fishermen, and the two old people in dark clothing, a man and a woman, moved carefully around them, bodies bent against the wind. The woman wore a black shawl over her head and the man held his cap on with his hand. It was Sunday, and they were going home from mass.
At the path that led through the garden to the house, they stopped. The woman pointed to a small skiff tied to a post among the reeds and said something to her husband. He shook his head, then shrugged. He did not know, he did not care. When they went into the house, there was a stranger sitting at the plank table near the stove. He wore the wool cap and clothing of a river fisherman. He stood up politely as they entered. “Please forgive me,” he said in Russian, “for coming into your house without invitation.”
The woman recognized him then—he was the man who had taken Khristo away from Vidin—and her hands flew to the knot of her shawl. The old man stared at the stranger.
“Who are you?” he said.
“He is the Russian,” his wife said. She let go of the knot, but her mouth was tight with anxiety.
The old man continued to stare. Finally, as though he remembered, he said, “Oh yes.”
The woman opened the door of the stove, inserted a few sticks of oak branch and prodded the fire to life with an iron poker. She poured well water from a bucket into a kettle on the stove and spooned black tea into a battered copper samovar. Almost immediately, the room grew warm and smelled sharp and sweet from the wood smoke.
The Russian spoke gently to the old man. “Won't you sit down? ”
The man sat, took off his cap and placed it carefully on his knee, as though he were visiting the house, and waited for the other man to speak. From the wind, there were tears standing in the corners of his eyes.
The Russian walked to the window, stood to one side, and looked out. “I came inside,” he explained, “so as not to be seen by your neighbors. We know how things are going down here—I don't want to cause you trouble.”
The woman waited by the stove for the water to boil. “You will have tea,” she said.
“Yes. Thank you,” the Russian said, and sat down. “I've brought you a letter. From your son.”
“From Nikko?” the old man said.
The woman shifted the kettle noisily on the stove.
“No,” the Russian said. “From Khristo.”
The old man nodded.
“Shall I read it to you?” the Russian asked.
“Yes, please,” the woman said, her back to the room.
He reached inside his wool jacket and took out a square of paper, unfolded it carefully and smoothed it on the table. “There is no date, of course,” he said, “but I am permitted to tell you that it was written last week.”
“I see,” the old man said. His eyes narrowed and he nodded wisely, as though he well understood such complicated matters.
“ ‘Dear Papa,' it begins, ‘I greet you. I write in hope that you and Mama and Helena are in good health and that the fishing is good this year. I am well, though I work very hard, and there is a lot to learn. I am successful at my school, and my superiors are pleased with my progress. All here join me in hoping that the day may soon come when I can return to see you. Please kiss Mama for me. Your son, Khristo.' ”
The old woman walked over from the stove and the Russian handed her the letter. She could not read, but she held it up to the light, then touched the writing. “Thank you,” she said to the Russian.
“Look.” She showed the old man the letter. “It is from Khristo.”
He stared at the paper for a time, then said, “That's good.”
“He's doing very well indeed,” the Russian said, taking the letter back. “Better than most of the others.”
“And he is in Russia?” the woman asked.
The Russian smiled, apologetic. “I cannot tell you where he is. About that I am sorry, very sorry, because he would be proud for you to know it.”
“Oh,” she said, disappointed.
They were silent for a time, then the Russian relented. “He is in the place where he has always most wanted to go. But you must not tell anybody that.”
The woman returned to the stove, the water was just beginning to boil. “We do not speak of him,” she said.
“But you can surely guess,” the Russian said.
She thought for a moment. “He is in Vienna? Khristo?”
“Perhaps,” the Russian said.
“Or Paris?”
The Russian spread his hands in helplessness, he was not allowed to tell.
“How he dreamed of such places,” she said, shaking her head. She poured a thin stream of steaming water into the samovar. “We have never been to Sofia, even,” she added. She left the tea to steep and went to her husband and squeezed his arm. “Nicolai,” she said, “did you hear that? He is in a great city. Vienna, or Paris, or somewhere.”
The old man nodded. “That's good,” he said.
He woke at noon, lit a Gitane from the packet on the night table, then lay back on the pillow and watched the blue smoke curl up to the ceiling. There was a neatly spun web in one corner of the ceiling, a small spider fussing at its center strands. Max, Aleksandra called him. Their house pet. Cigarette smoke seemed to affect Max, provoking him into a spasm of housekeeping. On the top of the dresser, the food from the party was laid out like a miniature buffet—though Aleksandra had pretty much done for the asparagus. The other item he'd brought home was lying, tossed casually aside, in a nest of string and brown paper.
Aleksandra had gone off to work, at the bookstore near the Café Flor on the square in front of the church of St.-Germain-des-Près. It was a communist-surrealist-anarchist-dadaist bookstore, a true Rive Gauche jungle of wild beards, curved pipes, black sweaters and sloe-eyed girls who stared. A serious place, at the geographical center of the city's artistic and political whirlpool, decorated with clenched-fist posters of all sorts. According to Aleksandra, all the local celebrities—Picasso, Modigliani, Jean Cocteau, André Breton—were seen there, as well as at their customary tables at the Café Flor.
Cigarette in hand, he rose naked from the rumpled sheets, padded across the cold floor, and opened the shutters. Above the rooftops, the sky was sharply blue, with white scud racing in from the Brittany coast. There was a pale girl who lived in a room across the street, Khristo had once waved to her as she shook a dust mop out the window, and she had waved back. Her shutter was closed this morning. By opening the window and leaning well out, he could see down into the street. Women with long breads in string bags. School kids in their uniforms coming home for lunch. One of the Jewish tailors, in yarmulke, black vest and rolled-up shirtsleeves, put his cat out the door of his shop. The air smelled like dust and garbage and garlic and March weather. Not a sign of last night's snow.
He put on pants and shirt and went down the hall and used the toilet, then returned to the room, adjusted the shutters so that he could still see a slice of sky but no one could look in, and took the pistol from its brown paper nest. He lit another cigarette and propped it on a Suze ashtray and went to work. Broke out the magazine and examined it in the light. It was a 9 mm automatic of Polish manufacture, designated wz/35 for the year of its design, called the Radom after the works where it was made. Large and heavy, it had an excellent reputation for dependability. He played with it for a time, discovering that what seemed to be the safety was in fact a slide lock that facilitated field-stripping the weapon. He took it apart, checked for burrs in the metal, found everything smooth and oiled. The wooden grip was scratched and nicked—the pistol had obviously been well used.
He had purchased the pistol at Omaraeff's request—one couldn't say no to one's friend and boss—and it had been easy enough to find. He'd gone to the Turkish quarter, well out the Boulevard Raspail at the farthest reaches of the city. Found the right café on the second try. Struck up a conversation with a man named Yasin (or so he said) who, for six hundred francs, had returned with the Radom after only a twenty-minute absence. Khristo now rewrapped the package, glanced at the clock on the table, finished dressing, and headed for the Métro.
Omaraeff had told him they would be having lunch at a place called Bistro Jambol—a pleasant coincidence since Jambol was the name of a town in Bulgaria. But, when Khristo opened the steam-fogged door of the restaurant, he realized with horror that it was no coincidence at all. The smell of the agneshki drebuliiki—lamb innards grilled with garlic—came rushing up at him, along with the realization that he was standing in a roomful of expatriate Bulgarians while holding in his hand a Polish pistol wrapped in brown paper. He broke into a sweat. Of all the stupid places to go! Half the Paris NKVD would be hanging around. He took a small step backward, then a hand closed around his elbow. He looked behind him to discover a tiny waiter with slicked-back hair and a milky eye. “Omaraeff?” the man said. Khristo nodded dumbly. The man had a grip like a pincers—he felt halfway to the Lubianka then and there. “Upstairs,” the man said in Bulgarian, nodding toward a rickety staircase on the far wall.
At the top, tables were packed together on a balcony. “Nikko!” Omaraeff was beckoning violently. “Over here.” He moved sideways through a sea of people—eyes rising to meet his own—talking, gesturing, observing his progress, all without missing a bite.
“Zdrasti!” Omaraeff greeted him as he sat down. “May you live a hundred years—don't eat the lamb.”
Khristo stared at the hand-scratched Cyrillic on the ragged piece of paper that served as menu. A waiter filled the cloudy glass at his side with yellow wine that smelled like resin. “What, then?”
“Try the shkembe.”
Beef kidney cooked in milk. He ordered it, and the sweating waiter flew away. The room was dense with clouds of strong smoke from the black tobacco.
Omaraeff smiled. “Just like home, eh, Nikko?”
“Yes,” Khristo said. “Just like home.”
Omaraeff described himself, with a smile, as a circus Bulgarian. His enormous head was shaved smooth, and he wore a grand Turkish mustache, waxed to a fine point on either end. He looked like a strong man in a circus, an appearance that gave him great cachet as the headwaiter at Heininger. To this, for luncheon, he had added a pale gray linen suit and vest, set off by a lavender silk tie fixed in place by a stickpin of ruby-colored glass, the entire ensemble overlaid by a cloud of cologne that smelled like cloves. He took a long sip of the resinous wine and closed his eyes with pleasure. Suddenly, a dramatic melancholy fell upon him. “Ah Nikko, how sadly we wander this world.” He raised his glass before Khristo's eyes, a symbol of good times gone away.
“That's so,” Khristo said, not wanting to be impolite. But he could see Omaraeff, in his mind's eye, taking supper in the Heininger kitchen before the late evening crowds arrived. A slice of white Normandy veal washed down with a little Chambertin. Surely he made the most of his exile.
“Mark my words, boy, our time is coming soon enough.”
The shkembe arrived, a vast plateful of it, reeking of rose pepper and sour milk and the singular aroma of kidney. Khristo poked it about with his fork and ate a boiled potato. “I've brought you a Radom,” he said, gesturing with a glance toward the brown parcel by a dish of raw onions.
“Good. It will speak for us. Speak to the world.”
“Oh?”
“Mm,” Omaraeff said, his mouth full of stew. He swallowed vigorously. “The Bolsheviiki press us too hard, eh?” He wiped his mouth with a large napkin and lifted his glass. “Czar Boris!”
“Czar Boris,” Khristo repeated. The wine was thick and bitter.
Loud voices flared suddenly to life. He looked over the railing of the balcony and saw two old men with white beards who had risen abruptly from their table, upsetting a plate of yellow soup, which splattered on the floor. “A prick on your grave!” one of the men shouted. “And on yours!” the other answered, grabbing him by the throat. Diners on all sides cheered as they choked one another. Waiters came rushing in to separate them, the table went over with a crash, several people wrestled in a heap amid the spilled food on the floor.
Omaraeff shook his head with admiration. “Look at that old fart Gheorghiev, will you? All for honor. Hit him, Todor,” he called over the balcony. “Break the bastard's head!” He turned back to Khristo and punched a thick index finger into the brown package. “It's come to this now. You'll see.” His fingernails were perfectly trimmed and had the opalescent shine produced by a suede buffer.
“Perhaps you ought not to tell me too much, Djadja Omaraeff. Some things are best done in secrecy.” Everyone called Omaraeff Uncle.
“Not tell you? Not tell Nikko? Hell boy, you are the one who's going to do it!”
“I am?”
“You'll see.” He raised his glass. “Adolf Hitler.”
“Adolf Hitler,” Khristo repeated.
They waited at a corner of the Boulevard St.-Michel, the flics would not let them cross the street. Close ranks of marching men and women swept past them, chanting and singing.
Omaraeff wore a topcoat that matched his suit, and the stiff wind toyed with the flaps as he stood at the edge of the pavement, eyes smoldering, hands jammed in pockets as though he feared they might reach out and smack a few heads. Khristo was bundled in his battered sheepskin jacket, and they looked for all the world like a well-to-do uncle and a wayward nephew, the latter having just recently been treated to a morally instructive lunch.
“And which are these?” Omaraeff asked. His voice floated on a sea of contempt.
“Medical students, I believe. The stethoscopes …”
“Ah-hah. Doctors.” The word spoke volumes.
A young man with an artist's flowing hair turned to them and raised his fist. “Red front!” he called out proudly. A thin fellow by his side added, “Join us!” His friend completed the thought: “Bring peace and mercy to all mankind!”
Khristo imagined them in a room with Yaschyeritsa and smiled sadly at the thought.
“Come on,” the young man urged, observing the smile.
A group of women in uniform—white hats and gray capes—marched below a banner stretched across the street: NURSE WORKERS FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE.
Omaraeff growled deep in his throat. “Go look up Comrade Stalin's rear end and see if you find justice,” he said—Khristo laughed despite himself—“and powder his balls while you're at it.”
The nurses wore their hair severely cut, and their faces were plain and pale without makeup. He found them very beautiful. “Comrades,” one of them called out, “have courage.” So God speaks to me, Khristo thought. He would need courage to contend with Omaraeff. You might know a man fairly well, he realized, then suddenly he revealed his politics and turned into a werewolf before your very eyes. Could not one be just a waiter?
The nurses were followed by the municipal clerks, angry, shabby men and women with grim faces. One imagined piles of tracts in their houses, learned by rote, and shotguns in closets. The day is coming, their eyes said. They would, Khristo knew, rule the world under Bolshevism—formerly despised, at last triumphant, paying back a list of slights that reached to heaven.
“Who have we now?” Omaraeff asked.
“The clerks of the city.”
“They look dangerous.”
“They are.”
Omaraeff was tight-lipped. “You see what we face. When the marching begins, the next thing is throwing bombs. Well, we'll put a stop to that. Trust Djadja. For a long time I averted my eyes. This is not my country, I reasoned, let them go to hell in their own way, what do I care?”
“What has changed?”
“Everything has changed. Now there are strikes, here, in England, even America. And posters, and parades. And those NKVD devils are everywhere, stirring the pot. You know who I'm talking about?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, you must share my view.”
“Of course,” he said. Unconsciously, he shifted the packaged Radom to his other hand.
“One might use it right now,” Omaraeff said. “And to good effect.”
“Well …”
“But I have bigger things in mind.”
There was a stir across the boulevard. A man in the crowd had shouted something that reached the marchers' ears, and one of them strode menacingly toward his tormentor. A policeman stepped out into the street and swung his cape—weighted with lead balls in the bottom hem. The marcher danced away and made an obscene gesture with an adamant thrust of both arms. The marchers, a battalion of streetsweepers, some of whom carried their brooms like rifles, roared their approval.
They were followed by the salesgirls of the grands magasins in their gray smocks. In their midst marched Winnie and Dicky Beale, arm in arm, faces set in pained but hopeful expressions, perfectly in keeping with the emotional atmosphere of the march. They were, Khristo noted, smartly dressed for the occasion. Winnie Beale had on a worker's peaked cap, properly tilted over one eye, and the squarish, broad-shouldered suit offered by Schiaparelli that was popular for communist events. Elsa Schiaparelli had journeyed to Moscow in 1935 to observe the workers' styles that would, it was felt, now take precedence in the fashion world. Dicky, careful always not to upstage his furiously engagé wife, had merely replaced shirt and tie with a turtleneck sweater beneath his London suit.
Omaraeff shook his head in patient sorrow. “Lambs,” he said.
A half hour later, they stood across the street from an elegant six-story building on the Place de l'Opéra, amid commercial luxury of every sort—marble banks, furriers, jewelers, and sociétés anonymes. Money and discretion mingled in the afternoon air. The restaurant interiors were subdued and richly decorated, and the shop windows showed the latest colors, Wallis Simpson Blue and Coronation Purple. The people in the street were perfectly barbered and smartly dressed, their complexions slightly pink after long, elaborate lunches.
Omaraeff gestured toward the building with his head. “There it is,” he said. “Murderer's gold.”
“That building?”
“Yes. The top floor is owned by a firm called Floriot et cie. It is a gold repository, for those whose faith in banks did not survive 1929—the Credit Anstalt failure and all of that. In such times it can be very comforting to have some gold locked up in a private vault.”
“I see.”
“What you do not see is that the NKVD sells its gold there.”
Khristo's response was brusque. He was, for a moment, an intelligence officer once again, and asked the intelligence officer's eternal question: “How do you know?”
“Friends, Nikko. Friendship is our gold. The newspaper kiosk on the corner is owned by an old man called Leonid, who was a banker in St. Petersburg until 1917. Now he stands in his stall for sixteen hours a day, selling newspapers. And he is forced to watch Russians, coming and going at all hours, with black satchels. It is not so farfetched to say that it is his gold, formerly, that passes before his eyes. A cruel irony, but what can he do? He can come to Djadja Omaraeff, that's what he can do. And he has done it.”
“And what do you propose?”
“I propose to take it from them.”
“And the pistol?”
“Just in case. One may meet unfriendly persons anywhere, even in the Opéra.”
“Who is to plan it?”
“That's you, Nikko my boy.”
Khristo shook his head. He felt like a man sliding helplessly down a sheer slope toward the cliff that would kill him. “How would I know such things, Djadja? I am only a waiter.”
“Not a bad one, either, I've seen to that. What else does one know? Well, you are Bulgarian—but you are not in Bulgaria. Perhaps you do not like the situation there, the way the political wind blows. Yet you do not sit in the lap of the reds, either. You were in Spain, Vladi Z. has told me that, and I doubt you fought for the Falange. You are quiet, in great possession of yourself, everybody's acquaintance, nobody's friend. Marko the bartender tells me you take a different bridge across the Seine every night. And, at last, I ask you to get me a pistol—a test of friendship—and you do get it. And not at a pawnshop, either, I'll wager. What is one to think?”
Khristo was silent.
“Just so,” Omaraeff said, and patted him affectionately on the shoulder.