Ilya sat back and stared at his reflection in the dark window. He saw a taut, colorless face above the green NKVD uniform. By inference, he pieced together what he took to be Sascha's intentions. The mouth of the Dniester was less than a hundred miles from the Romanian delta of the Dunaărea—the Danube. Since the surrender, converted ore steamers moved constantly back and forth between the two areas, sailing empty into Romania, returning with wheat, vegetables, horses, and God knew what else. Sascha intended to escape from the camp, then he meant to stow away on a Black Sea steamer that left from Odessa and called at Belgorod, where a chemical works was being built by Gulag labor. He would hide aboard the ship at Belgorod, then disembark secretly at Izmail, the Soviet port on the Danube, after which he would make his way to Sfintu Gheorghe—nominally in the nation of Romania, but in fact a part of the ancient region known as Bessarabia, a remote corner of the world, so lost as to be nearly unknown.
If the letter were delivered to Voluta, he would use the NOV apparatus to move the letter to a Western intelligence service, and Sascha believed he would be exfiltrated from the little fishing village of Sfintu Gheorghe. The letter had to go to Voluta because Sascha was aware that Voluta knew him personally and that he, as well as other members of the BF 825 conspiracy, were in a position to confirm his value to the Western services.
It was, in its own way, a reasonably clever plan. Escape from a camp in the Kolyma was nearly impossible—the land itself was a prison. And no Allied intelligence service would want to attempt this sort of covert action in the country of a nominal ally, thus Sascha had placed responsibility on himself for leaving Russian soil. Romania, on the other hand, was in a condition of political flux that might facilitate an operation to remove a desirable asset.
But, Ilya realized, years of training and practical experience said no. The scheme had virtually no chance of success: too many steps, too many assumptions, a blind thrust from a doomed man. In effect, it sentenced Sascha to death and, once he escaped from Belgorod and someone checked on how he came to be transferred there in the first place, sentenced Ilya Goldman to death as well.
Unless by April 12, Ilya thought, listening to the slow beat of the wheels, I am somewhere else.
But if the exfiltration scheme was wishful thinking, the part of the plot that touched him was close to perfect. Considered objectively, Sascha Vonets had built a fine trap. In it, Ilya realized, he could move in only one direction; there were no exits along the way and, at the end, it sent him where he wanted to go. The white face in the window smiled ruefully. Truly, you couldn't ask for a better trap than that.
Christmas, Rozhdyestvo, was no longer a holy day in the Soviet Union, yet somehow, on the night of December 24, the duty roster at the Fourth Division of the Sixth Directorate was seriously depleted. The inspector general's central bureau in Moscow was on Ulyanovskaya Street, in a turn-of-the-century building with vast marble hallways that had once housed the czar's Corn Tax apparat. Ilya Goldman was very nearly alone in the building on Christmas Eve—most of the senior officers seemed to be down with the flu or engaged in important business outside the office. Perhaps, Ilya thought, they were engaged in the surveillance of Dedushka Moroz, Father Frost, as he visited children on the night before Christmas. In any event, Captain Ilya Goldman was a Jew and, as such, found it productive not to have the flu or important business elsewhere on Christmas Eve, and had volunteered to work a double shift and assume the responsibility of night duty officer.
He dug away at his paperwork until a little after midnight, then strolled down the corridor to the office of Major General Lyuzhenko, whose chief responsibility was the suppression of the occasional uprising within the camp populations. He'd chosen Lyuzhenko, a particularly nasty brute with a savage temper, rather carefully, for the man was, in Ilya's scheme of things, about to commit the single honorable act of his life. One could, when the fat was in the fire, hear him all over the seventh floor—screaming on the telephone, cursing, almost weeping with rage.
Lyuzhenko had locked his office door, but to Captain Goldman, trained as he was by the NKVD, that did not present a serious problem. Ilya turned on the office lights and rummaged through the files until he found a packet of transfer forms. He put one in Lyuzhenko's secretary's typewriter and filled it out, making all the proper marks in the appropriate boxes. Under the heading Reason for Transfer he wrote: “By order of Major General Lyuzhenko.” That had been reason enough in the past, it would be now. He found a letter signed by the general, slid it beneath the transfer and traced out the signature, using a pen from the desk drawer. He turned off the lights, locked up the office, and proceeded down the hall, collecting three countersignatures in precisely the same manner in three other offices. He then deposited the transfer in the Action box on the desk of the commanding officer's secretary and Sascha Vonets was on his way to Belgorod-Dnestrovskij. How quickly, Ilya thought, the Soviet bureaucracy could move when it wanted to.
He left the building, walking along Ulyanovskaya Street for several blocks, then turning north toward one of the buildings given over to the Ministries of Transport (Internal). The door guard, seeing his NKVD uniform, let him in without question. Who knew what business these people might be about, even on what used to be Christmas Eve.
The hallways of this particular ministry were even grander than his own, and each floor had its own cleaning lady, traditional Russian babas in kerchiefs who spent the long night down on their knees with buckets of soapy water and hard brushes, rubbing away at the heelmarks of the previous day's boots. On the third floor, Ilya walked carefully along the wet marble, his footsteps echoing down the empty corridor. He found the third-floor cleaning lady just outside an office door marked Bureau of Streetcar Maintenance—Assistant to the Deputy Director. She was all in black, large breasts swaying within an old cotton dress as she scrubbed, humming to herself, absorbed in this work that would go on night after night, apparently forever.
She saw him approach and stand before her but took no notice of him, he was just another pair of boots. When he handed her a slip of brown paper with tiny printing crammed on one side and the coded name of an addressee on the other she took no notice of that either, simply tucked it away somewhere inside her dress with one hand while scrubbing away with the other.
Back on Ulyanovskaya Street, Ilya walked slowly toward his office. The night was icy cold and clear, a million stars overhead.
At 6:30 on the morning of December 25, Natalya Federova, a cleaner at the offices of the Ministries of Transport, waited at the Usacheva tram station for the number 26 trolley, which would take her back to the flat she shared with her daughter and son-in-law and their children. By coincidence, her sister's husband, Pavel, took this same route, and six days a week they greeted each other as she got on the trolley to go home and he got off to go to his job. It was snowing lightly, a fine, dry snow of the sort that often went on for days.
The trolley was twenty minutes late, but Natalya waited patiently with the other night workers heading home, all of them standing quietly in the falling snow. When the trolley finally did arrive, Pavel was among the last to get off, so they kissed hurriedly and he murmured a salutation—Shrozedestvrom Kristovim, Christ is born—by her ear as their cheeks brushed. He clasped her hand warmly for a moment, then tucked the slip of brown paper away in the pocket of his infantryman's coat. He had lost an eye in the fighting at Stalingrad and wore three ranks of medals on his chest.
The brief greeting kept her from being early on the tram, so she had to stand for the hour-and-a-half ride back to her flat. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and gazed pensively out the windows at the passing city, looking forward to the dinner she would have with her sister and Pavel that night. She planned to bake a Christmas bread for the occasion. It would have to be made without eggs, sadly, and raisins were out of the question, but Pavel had received a little packet of powdered sugar at his job, so there would be something sweet for the Christmas meal.
A few minutes before seven, Pavel arrived at the Usacheva Street offices of the temporary Belgian mission, where he worked as a porter. Humming to himself, he took out the garbage cans—the big, dented one with food scraps and other “wet materials” would be picked up by a garbage truck. The small wooden one, “dry materials,” was mostly office waste, paper trash of all sorts generated by the night shift of communications clerks at the mission, and it was picked up by two men in a black car who never spoke to him.
Next, he made a round of the mission offices, making sure the ashtrays were clean and emptying the pencil sharpener shavings into a piece of newspaper. The tiny office at the end of the hall was used by a junior diplomat—a devout Catholic, the grandson of Polish immigrants to Belgium—and after Pavel emptied his pencil shavings on the paper he left him a little something in return: a slip of brown paper, folded once, inserted in the barrel of the pencil sharpener before the canister was wiggled back into place and left upside down, a signal that the mailman had visited.
On January 10, a Canadian war correspondent was driven west from Moscow to the suburbs of Warsaw, to be on hand when Marshal Zhukov's First White Russian Front, accompanied by units of the Lublin Polish Army, marched in to take official control of the city. Zhukov's divisions had been waiting across the Vistula since August of 1944, while the Polish Home Army under General Bor fought it out in the streets and sewers of Warsaw with Hitler's Totenkopf (Death's Head) Division. Some quarter of a million Polish partizans had died in the fighting—only occasionally supplied by the Russians. Thus there would be no resistance from the Poles when the Lublin Army, representing the Polish Communist party, took over the administration of the country. The Canadian reporter was entertained on the night of January 15 by a group of Zhukov's aides. There was great good fellowship and many toasts were drunk. As a cold sun rose on the morning of the sixteenth, the correspondent walked down to the Vistula and stared out at the haze of gray smoke hanging over the burnt-out city. When he returned to the old manor house that served as Zhukov's headquarters, the little slip of brown paper had been removed from the bottom of his sleeping bag. He was glad to see it go. The tiny Cyrillic printing had been beyond his ability to read, but he'd taken special care of the thing while it was in his possession. These little “favors” he did for his Belgian friend made him nervous, but in return he was sometimes permitted to send solid background material off to Canada in the Belgian diplomatic pouch, thus evading the heavy-handed Russian censorship. The newspaper was delighted with these transmissions, spread the material about to protect their source, and had advanced him three pay grades since August. He was glad of that, for he was very much a man who wanted to do well at his work. Josef Voluta had returned to Occupied Poland in the summer of 1944, along with two other members of NOV, the Polish Nationalist group made up of loosely affiliated army officers and Roman Catholic priests. They had been ordered to Warsaw to be on hand when their country returned to life but, instead, had witnessed its death.
By the end of July, the Poles could virtually taste freedom. July or August, that was the prevailing view. Pessimists spoke in favor of October. The German troops were giving ground, retreating from occupied territory throughout Eastern Europe, leaving behind terrified colonies of German “settlers” put in place by Hitler to bring civilization to the “barbarian” lands he had conquered.
By July 31, even the pessimists were heard whistling on the streets. The First Byelorussian Front under Rokossovsky was ten miles from Warsaw, but Hitler could not seem to bear the thought of losing his beloved Poland—his first conquest by force of arms, his first amour. NOV intelligence nets photographed the arrival of the SS Viking and Totenkopf divisions, the Hermann Göring Division, and the 19 th Panzer Brigade. They were the best—the worst—that Hitler could bring to bear.
But this did not deter the Polish Home Army, under General Komorovski (known then by his nom de guerre, General Bor), from rising against the Germans. The Poles had known the Russians for centuries and were indifferent to the distinctions between czars and Bolsheviks. Thus, when Rokossovsky took the city, the Poles had planned to greet their Russian allies as saviors and liberators, but not conquerors. And not occupation forces.
It went quite well in the first weeks. Panzer tanks, induced to enter the narrow alleyways of the old city, discovered themselves unable to maneuver and were then set alight by gasoline and soap bombs with potassium permanganate wicks. When the crews ran from the burning armor, Polish snipers knocked them down. Moscow radio celebrated the uprising, calling out in a September 5 broadcast for all patriotic Poles to “join battle with the Germans, this time for decisive action!” Throughout the city of Warsaw, partisan units attacked German positions, often at night: lively, sudden, short-range ambushes by running shadows who melted away into the darkness as German reinforcements arrived.
By the middle of September, however, the Poles were running out of supplies: food, ammunition, weapons, and especially anesthetics for the wounded. The Russians, still ten miles away across the Vistula, gave permission for British and American supply drops, using Russian airfields for refueling. Thus for four days, beginning on September 14, supplies reached the Polish fighters. But, on September 18, Russian permission was withdrawn. In the next three days, SS units inflicted terrible casualties on virtually disarmed partizan groups. Then, on September 21, a massive resupply effort was initiated—more than two thousand missions flown in a seven-day period. But, on September 30, with Polish units fully engaged, the Russians withdrew permission for a second time, and at that point the supply effort ended permanently.
By then, 250,000 Poles had died in the fighting. The Polish Home Army ceased to exist as a unified fighting force and, on October 19, Hitler determined to destroy that which he could not possess: under his specific orders, German engineers methodically blew the city to pieces. The Lublin Committee—the Soviet-sponsored government-in-exile—condemned the uprising, calling it “futile.” On the first day of 1945, the Lublin Committee declared itself the legitimate government of Poland. On January 17, the Russians finally crossed the Vistula and the First White Russian Front under Zhukov marched triumphant into the city.
Voluta had stayed on in Warsaw long after it became clear that the city was doomed. There was always one more thing that had to be done—wounded to be cared for, German positions observed, gasoline bombs to be manufactured, last rites offered. The partizans lived like rats in a city of ghosts, a city that burned for three months and immolated its own dead. Voluta picked wheat grains from the mud to keep from starving, loaded machine-gun belts, performed an operation on a wounded man with a tailor's needle and thread, using wood alcohol as an anesthetic because there simply wasn't anything else.
On January 3, Voluta had been able to reestablish contact with his base in Vatican City, sending a coded radio message to the NOV communications center. A commercial frequency was used, with a letter code based on Chapter Twelve of the Book of Daniel. The German radio réparage had almost caught up with him, because he was exhausted and slow on the keys of the transmitter and the sending had taken him much too long. But the driver of the German radio truck had become disoriented in the dense pall of smoke that lay over the city and a few teenagers had come up out of a sewer and turned the truck over, lighting off the gasoline with a strip of shirttail run into the tank.
Voluta's contact was answered on January 9. A fifty-second transmission in Book of Daniel code, ordering him to wait for “an urgent letter” that was moving toward him via the NOV courier system and telling him where and when he could receive it. The latter half of the transmission ordered him to forward this message to “KS” and informed Voluta of his whereabouts.
Thus, on the morning of January 17, he made his way to a shattered tenement on the edge of what had once been the Jewish ghetto, where a group of youngsters was busily breaking down—emptying sandbags, tearing apart a wall built of paving stones—a machine-gun emplacement that had somehow survived the destruction of the city. A girl of thirteen greeted him and handed over a small slip of brown paper. They stood together at the edge of an enormous hole that had been blown in the street by a German 88 round. Voluta could see down into a sewer, where black water flowed sluggishly past, sometimes carrying a body in its current. From the distance, the sound of a Russian marching band could be heard, brassy and discordant. Voluta read the slip of paper quickly, then put it in his pocket.
“Thank you,” he said to the girl. Then nodded toward the blare of the music and added, “You must be careful now, you know.”
She smiled at him, face gray with soot and ash, hands wound with rags against barrel burns from the machine gun, feet lost in a preposterously large pair of Wehrmacht tanker's boots. “I shall be, Father,” she said to him, “you may be sure of that.”
“You had no trouble across the river?”
“No, Father, no trouble. They were all snoring like krokodil, and, anyhow, I have learned to be invisible.”
He nodded, said good-bye, then touched her face for a moment. His heart swelled with things to be said but he could say none of them.
At nightfall, he left the city, dressed as a laborer. The following morning, dressed as a priest, he crossed through rear-guard elements of the retreating German divisions, giving his blessing to those soldiers who requested it. After that, he headed south and a little west, meaning to deliver the slip of brown paper to the “KS” named by the NOV officers in Rome. The message could have been moved unobtrusively into diplomatic channels—far more efficient than a priest walking by daylight through the battered and frozen countryside—but the NOV officers knew the ways of bureaucrats, knew the fate of paper that sat on desks.
So he walked, sometimes riding a little way with a farmer who still had a horse and cart, day after day, often through snow, moving always southwest, along one of the many escape routes—some so old and well used that they were marked by fugitive's huts—that led out of Poland.
They had come to Khristo Stoianev in December of 1944 and asked him to undertake the FELDSPAR mission. They had not threatened him—they were the OSS, not the NKVD—but neither had they relieved him of any obligation he might place upon himself. They were all very well dressed, these people, and they spent money like water, taking him to lunch or dinner over a three-week period and sliding Swiss franc notes from leather wallets and dropping them atop the check on its little plate and not waiting for change. “We don't want you to feel we're putting pressure on you,” one of them said in the grand dining room of the Hotel Schwarzwald in Bern, putting extraordinary pressure on him at precisely that moment. “It would,” the man said ruefully, knocking cold ash from the bowl of his pipe by smacking it against his palm, “be very dangerous work.”
“Where is it?” he'd asked.
The man put the pipe in his mouth and made a whistling sound by blowing into it a few times, making sure the stem was clear. “Prague,” he said.
“I cannot speak native Czech,” Khristo answered.
“No, you can't,” the man said, “but you'll do for a Yugoslav. Perhaps a machinist, forced labor, you know the sort of thing.” He began to pack tobacco into his pipe from a leather pouch as a waiter came gliding to the table like a swan and began the exquisitely laborious process—silver urn, gleaming hotel china, silver cream pitcher, sugar bowl and tongs—of serving coffee.
Who could say no?
Who could bear the subsequent weight of Episcopalian disappointment, unvoiced but not uncommunicated, the dreadful undercurrent of icy sympathy extended to those who have proven themselves, at last, cowards and failures. We don't blame you, of course, it's just not in your nature to accept danger, they would say. Or, rather, much worse, they wouldn't say.
Yet the approach could be resisted and often enough was—by those to whom survival really was paramount—but Khristo was not among them. His dining companion's eyes twinkled as he sipped his coffee and looked over the rim of his cup. “I'm proud of you. I really am,” he said as he set the cup down. “Once this Nazi business is done with”—he lit the pipe at last, and the table was wreathed with drifts of sweet-smelling smoke—“well, there's always the future to consider.”
It was said as an afterthought, almost, we know you don't require an inducement, but here's one anyhow. The man's expression, in that moment, had something of the philosopher about it, suggesting he knew all too well that people accepted such missions for reasons of the heart, and that material rewards were of no consequence once the real danger was considered. Thus Khristo found himself bribed and flattered in the same moment. Wily old bastard, he thought, enjoying the performance for the pure virtuosity of it. “Someone has to do it,” the man said, shaking his head in wonder at what the world seemed to demand of both of them.
And the restaurant bills were nothing compared to what they spent on him after the operation got under way. The NKVD, he thought, would have woven an elaborate conspiracy to achieve the same results, using coercion, ideology—whatever human pressure point could be laid bare. The Americans, on the other hand, fought with money and technology, and they were extravagant with both.
They flew Khristo down to OSS headquarters in Bari, Italy, and trained him in the use of the new J-E radio. The Joan-Eleanor communications system had been the brainchild of Lieutenant Commander Steve Simpson, an engineer from RCA, who named the invention after a certain Joan, a WAC major he quite liked, and Eleanor, the wife of his associate, DeWitt Goddard. Clandestine communications to that point had depended on the self-descriptive suitcase radio. The J-E radio was six inches long, had an aerial that unfolded to one foot in length, and transmitted to a receiver in a British De Havilland Mosquito—a fast little two-man fighter-bomber with a range of 1800 miles—circling above the transmission point. And the German radio réparage could not locate a J-E radio.
On a quarter-moon night in early January, Khristo Stoianev was parachuted into the Czech countryside south of Prague, the insertion achieved by a B-24 Liberator specially modified for agent drops behind enemy lines. The bomber was painted matte black, making it nearly invisible, even when tracked by German searchlights. The exhaust flame was shielded, the ball turret normally found on the belly of the plane had been removed—altering its silhouette—and a hinged plywood panel installed in its place to serve as exit hatch for the parachutist. The navigator's compartment in the nose of the airplane was sealed off in such a way as to create the total darkness required for visual navigation at night. On a normal bombing run, great numbers of planes flew over a target at 20,000 feet, protected by fighter squadrons.
Agent insertion technology demanded that the plane fly alone, 500 feet above the ground, at the slowest possible speed—sometimes less than 120 miles per hour—the sort of contour aviation that demanded some moonlight and a cloudfree night. The navigator followed roads, or moonlight reflected from rivers or lakes. Some of the runs used German concentration camps as beacons, since they were lit brightly all night long to discourage escapes.
Khristo landed without difficulty, in the proper location. His papers were excellent forgeries, typed on German typewriters, stamped properly with German inks, and the legend created for him—a fictitious life cycle from birth to present—was indeed as the man with the pipe had suggested it might be. He was a Yugoslav conscript worker of Croatian origin, a machine tool expert and drill-press operator, a valuable asset to the Reich. He carried a thick wad of German Reichsmarks and Czech crowns and an additional sum in gold coins. His map was perfect, guiding him into Prague along the Vltava River in something under six hours once he had stolen a bicycle. He made his way to a safe house, owned by a mathematics teacher, where he was received with cheese dumplings and eggs.
The objectives of the FELDSPAR mission were not complicated: he was to collect and transmit data on bombing effectiveness and war factory production in Bohemia, the region of Prague, and prepare for the reception of additional agents. The J-E radio would work very nicely from a roof, and the Mosquito would be circling 35,000 feet above him at certain prearranged hours of the night, unseen by German antiaircraft crews. There had been no arrangement made for exfiltration; General Patton's Third Army was headed that way at a good clip and they would come to him. If he got into trouble, the Czech underground could move him to the protection of units fighting in the Tatra Mountains to the south.
Hundreds of man-hours had clearly been spent on this mission and, to the extent possible, the nature of the operation shielded him from excessive peril. That gave him a certain confidence, reinforced by his NKVD schooling and experience, which trained one to rely on guile and ruthlessness because there was no J-E radio and not enough aviation gasoline for an airplane to fly in circles over the communicating agent.
Concentrate, the briefers told him. Know where you are and whom you are with every second of every day, and if you experience fatigue, treat it as you would a dangerous sickness. Keep incriminating evidence as far away from you as possible—hide everything. When you are out in the streets of Prague, you must be a Yugoslavian conscript worker. They used chemicals to remove the nicotine stain from his index finger because cigarettes were sufficiently scarce in Occupied Europe that the yellowish discoloration was now rarely seen. The Czechs you'll be working with, they told him, are very good, espionage has been a high art in Central Europe for hundreds of years. FELDSPAR certainly was, he thought, a mission guaranteed for success as much as any operation of that type could ever be.
Perhaps his nerve slipped.
He accused himself of that more than once, as January became February and Prague lay under a blanket of dirty ice in the coldest winter in Europe for forty years. He'd left the teacher's house after three days. He had no objective reason to do so—it was simply that the neighborhood felt wrong. He moved to a burned-out warehouse on the eastern edge of the industrial district, a place where barrels of cooking oil had been stored. The building stood three stories high, scorch patterns flared out on the plaster walls above and below the broken windows, and when the rains came in early March, oil that had leached into the cinder loading yard over the years returned to the surface and the smell of it, singed and rancid, hung in the wet air. He lived in what had once been the warehouse office, where a small stove still functioned, bought black market coal at an exorbitant price and lugged it back to his hideout in a metal bucket. And, anytime he went anywhere, he carried a small snub-nosed VZ/27 he'd picked up from his coal supplier. That was something no Yugoslav conscript worker would dare to have, but he had no intention of being taken alive here, not by these Occupation troops, not by this Gestapo. It was a cheap, shoddy weapon, a 7.65 automatic with a miserly eight-round magazine and a plastic grip, produced under Occupation, with Böhmische Waffenfabrik Prag replacing the usual Czech manufacturer's mark. This pistol was made in German Bohemia—the inscription implied—there is no such thing as Czechoslovakia.
But there was. The Czechs had insisted on that.
And the well-dressed people in Bern and Bari who had paid for the lunches hadn't told him about Prague. Oh, they'd told him, in so many words, in rather cool, unemotional language, what the situation was, describing the political climate, analyzing the cultural and economic conditions, characterizing weather, food, religion, local customs—all the empirical data you could want.
But Prague, in the winter and early spring of 1945, would have required a chorus of the damned to do it true justice. Khristo, when he was out among the people, believed he could actually feel it, like a sickness, a cold, gestating rage that swelled toward the moment of its birth. And the harder the Germans bore down, the more they whipped and tortured and executed, the more it grew. “The day will come,” one of his agents had told him, “when we will hang them up by the feet and soak them with gasoline and set them alight. Upside down, you see, so that they do not die too quickly from breathing the smoke. You will be here,” the man said. “You will see it.”
Khristo believed him. It was not a fantasy of the oppressed, it was a plan, a lucid, thought-out ritual of justice, and the day of its reality was not far off. In the Staroměstské Square, in the old part of the city, there was a medieval clock high on the façade of the town hall. When the hour struck, a painted Christ and twelve apostles would appear one by one in a little window below the clock, followed by the figure of hooded Death, whose bell sounded for the passing of time, then the Turk, the Miser, the Vain Fool, and, at last, the Cock. The Germans found it fascinating—Bohemian folklore displayed for their pleasure—and they would gather below the clock when it struck the hour and point and smile and take photographs. They seemed able to ignore the faces of the Czechs who surrounded them: taut, watchful faces, pale amid the dark clothing that everyone seemed to wear, pale in the perpetual dusk of cloudy days and coal smoke that hung above the city.
His principal contact with the Czech underground was named Hlava, a stolid, heavy man who wore eyeglasses with clear plastic frames, a man whose hoarse, measured breathing seemed, to Khristo, a kind of audible melancholia. They sat one seat apart in movie theaters, bumped shoulders in the street as they made brush passes—a scrap of paper moving invisibly from one to the other—urinated side by side in metal troughs in railway stations, shook hands like old friends in shopping streets just after dark. In one week in February they saw the same German newsreel three times: Hermann Göring, having just shot a bison in his private game preserve, distributed the meat to refugees on the road as they streamed in from Soviet-conquered territories in East Prussia.
Hlava was employed as chief bookkeeper in a factory that repaired shot-up Messerschmitt fighter planes. Now and then they were able to meet in a situation where actual conversation was possible, and Hlava revealed himself to be a man who told a certain kind of joke. “Three Czechs—a Bohemian, a Slovakian, and a Moravian—meet in heaven. The first one says …” He never laughed at the jokes, simply gazed at Khristo, awaiting a reaction, his breath rasping in and out in a slow, methodical tempo.
There were, at any given time, about a dozen other agents. Khristo spent his days bicycling around the city, hard-pressed to make his treffs—as the Russians called clandestine meetings. There was a violin teacher whose pupils were mostly the children of German officers, and she had a way with papers—letters, reports—left lying atop desks in studies. There was a police detective, apparently enough trusted by the Germans to see marginal intelligence distributions. Four or five factory workers, a factory physician, a clerk in the electric utility who fed him data on the daily rise and fall of power usage in certain industrial facilities critical to the German war effort.
But then, on March 20, he was offered information of a very different sort. It reached him in bed, amid a jumble of sweaty blankets in a hotel room that rented by the hour, reached him as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the waterstained ceiling above him, numb and mindless for the moment, in a blank daze that passed for tranquillity.
Magda, she was called, buxom and fat-hipped and exceptionally pink, with a thick yellow braid that fell to the small of her back. Had his controllers known about her, they would have told him he was signing his own death warrant. And she was not the only one; there were others, who drifted into his life, then disappeared: one was dark and looked like a Gypsy, another was very young and brought him small gifts. There was a seamstress who scented herself with lilac water, and a soldier's widow who dressed all in black.
Together, they constituted yet another step into the forbidden zone. Like the burned-out factory where he slept. Like the pistol beneath the horsehair pillow on the hotel bed. He'd been driven to it, somehow, he did not understand why, but something had its fist in his back and forced him into acts which, in his particular circumstances, amounted to dancing blindfolded at the edge of a cliff. The women he knew were not prostitutes, they simply needed money and needed to make love and weren't averse to going to bed with a generous man. And he was generous. “Here,” he'd say, “make sure and eat a good dinner tonight, you look worn out.” He knew that he was calling attention to himself, easily the worst thing he could do, but he couldn't stop. Maybe, he thought, his nerve really had slipped. Or was it, perhaps, some premonition about the future that compelled him to a kind of greed, compelled him to take from life anything it might give him. Christ, he thought, you are acting like Sascha Vonets.
“Hey you, dreamer,” said Magda, rolling onto her ample stomach and propping her chin on her hands. “I met an old friend of yours. He said, ‘That black-haired fellow you see, we used to be pals.' ”
Magda was much given to fancy, he didn't take it too seriously. “Oh?” he said. “What did he look like, then?”
“Mm, like Death in a play.”
She was evidently going to spin a tale. Amused, he turned on his side to see her face. “How strange. He carried a scythe, perhaps?”
“No, you stupid man. He was thin as a skeleton, with staring eyes and long, bony fingers. A scythe indeed! I was at the Novy Bor restaurant, at the buffet. He just came right up to my table and spoke to me. ‘Say hello to him for me,' he said.”
She moved her face close to his. “Now give me a great big kiss,” she said.
The truth of it began to reach him and his body tensed. “What are you saying?” he asked, eyes searching her placid face.
She made popping noises with her lips. “Kissy,” she said, running a fingernail down his flank.
“Is this true? What else did he say?” His voice was quite different now.
She pouted for a moment and rolled her eyes—she'd gotten his attention, but it wasn't the sort of attention she'd wanted. “Some silliness about a postal box. B, F, uh, eight something. I don't remember. But there is no such address in Prague. We don't use the alphabet, just numbers. One of your black market friends, no doubt. Now, ungrateful man …”
“That's it, all of it?” he said, every nerve in his body humming.
“Yes, my little king,” she sighed, sorry now that she'd bothered to bring it up, “that's all of it.” She snuggled against him and cooed on his chest, her hand walking on two fingers down his belly.
He made himself respond, and the cooing became mock-surprised, then appreciative. “Witch!” he said softly by her ear, “you turn a man into a tomcat.” He reached across her shoulder, pressed his cigarette out in an ashtray on the bedside table, stroked her back. Novy Bor restaurant, he thought, at the buffet.
“Meow,” she said.