Night Soldiers (30 page)

“Of course not. Every man to his pleasure.”

“Yes, yes,” Omaraeff said. He took the other boy by the waist and turned him back and front, like an artist contemplating a sculpture. “Perhaps next time, little one,” he said, dismissing him with a wave.

“We must be paid,” the boy said coldly in guttural French.

“You will be paid,” Omaraeff said. His voice sounded, for a moment, faded, used up. The boys left the room. Omaraeff lay back against the wall and closed his eyes. “So you see, Nikko my boy. Gold is everything.”

The Brasserie Heininger was quite mad that night, Khristo virtually ran from the moment he put on the waiter's uniform until the first light of dawn. It was a sumptuous place. One ascended a white marble staircase to find red plush banquettes, polished mirrors trimmed in thick gold leaf, and burnished copper lamps turned down to a soft glow. The brasseries had been started by competing beer breweries at the turn of the century and they retained a Victorian flavor, each one designed to be that ever so slightly vulgar place where one could behave in an ever so slightly vulgar way. A place where a glass of champagne might find its way down a daring cleavage. The waiters were blind to it, their expressions unchanging grins. “Be merry!” Papa Heininger insisted. They were always on the move, carrying silver platters of crayfish, grilled sausage, salmon in aspic. It was all far too overdone to be anything but deliciously cheap. A place to let your hair down.

That night they had singing Germans, a table of fourteen, heavy red faces bawling out dueling songs as shoulders were thumped and backs thwacked with huge glee. They had an attempted suicide in the Ladies' Room. A Portuguese countess slashed her shoulder with a scissors, then howled for assistance before her dress was ruined. This was followed by a brief but excellent fistfight between two wine brokers from Bordeaux. Two American heiresses indulged themselves in a hair-pulling contest—something to do with a husband, one gathered from the accompanying shrieks. His Most Royal Highness the Prince of Bahadur descended the long staircase on his backside, a series of breathtaking bumps that ended with His Highness roaring with laughter—thank God—on the floor of the lobby.

A night of madness
, Khristo thought.

Spring was coming, war was coming, perhaps nothing mattered very much. At dawn, in the room, Aleksandra sat pensively by the closed shutters, gray light spilling over her small breasts, the smoke from her cigarette rising lazily in the still air.

Very quietly, he probed to see if he might get another job. There was no question of staying at Heininger if he denied Omaraeff assistance—the
padrone
system demanded favors in return for favors, that was just the way life was. But the search proved useless. Paris was a village, in some ways no bigger than Vidin. Everybody knew everybody, through some connection or other, so if it happened that you were not known, you did not exist. The peculiar French mentality, a system of locks and gates and weirs so joyously flowing in the matter of sexual undertakings was, in the area of jobs and money—as the proprietor of a small bistro on the Rue de Rennes put it—
plus serré qu'un cul de guenon
. Tighter than a monkey's backside. Who were you? they wanted to know. They hired, it seemed, only cousins. First cousins. Before word of his research could reach Omaraeff, he gave it up.

And went to work.

Not committed to it, not really. Expecting along the way the usual impossibilities that snagged the vast percentage of all proposed clandestine actions. Ozunov, at Arbat Street, had cautioned: “Nine times out of ten the answer will be no. And of course you'll not be given any such thing as a reason.”

But so artfully fickle was the life of 1937, it seemed to Khristo, that the great snag absolutely refused to reveal itself. The operational people turned up by Omaraeff were not at all the corps of baboons he'd feared. In fact, they did quite well. Pazar, the cabdriver, perhaps an Armenian or a Turk; Justine, the stunning French wife of a Russian
chocolatier;
Ivan Donchev, a quaint old gentleman born in Sofia who had lived forty years in Paris, a retired bookkeeper who wore a rosebud in his lapel every day of his life.

He ran them under a cover that was marginal at best, but you couldn't just tell people what was going on. It would give them, if nothing else, a story for the
flics
if everything went entirely to hell. He presented himself as a confidential agent in the employ of a man who ran a courier service. The couriers had taken to dawdling, visiting their mistresses or gambling or drinking or
something
. One had to know. Therefore these couriers would be closely observed on their routes. The story fooled nobody, of course, but it was there if they wanted it.

In his heart he had to admit that he was happy in the work. He was slightly horrified to find it so, but there was no denying what he felt. The incessant groveling of his job as a waiter had begun to grate on him, and he could foresee a time when he would come to hate it.

Aleksandra noted the change immediately—her barometer was perilously accurate. “You seem awfully pleased these days,” she remarked, head canted at an inquisitive angle. “Perhaps you have another lover? Surely her bottom is cuter than mine.” Such impossibilities were duly and demonstratively denied, but she'd sensed that something was going on. “I am thinking of starting a business,” he told her. Oh? Did he think that rubbing shoulders with café society made him one of them? No, no, nothing like that. He wished to better himself. “Ah,” she said. She believed she had some facility in the making of fashionable
chapeaux
, perhaps a small store, in a reasonably good neighborhood, where she could set up as a milliner. Her chum Liliane had done that very thing, her
friend
had arranged it. The bookstore was boring. The beards breathed Marxist endearments in her face. It was dusty among the shelves. She sneezed. Her wage was a humiliation. A business would get them out of this room into something more suitable. She would learn to cook. She would have a fat
bébé
. In no time at all, they would be the most
grands
of
bourgeoises
.

At which point she laughed wildly and grabbed the tip of his nose so hard in her savage little fist that his eyes wept and he knocked her hand away. “What are you doing,
petit chou?”
she asked, hard as nails and smart as a whip. “Money,” he said, “it concerns money.” She lit a cigarette and turned away. “Well, then,” she said. But he knew she meant to find out the truth of it.

There were four couriers moving from the Soviet embassy to the Floriot gold repository. They had no schedule, though charts were endlessly drawn up that clocked them and their visits. The operation seemed to him a hurried one. That made sense. What with Stalin and Yezhov attacking the Kulaks, the ongoing purges turning up treasure troves in walls and chimneys, and the infusion of Spanish bullion, there was a great deal of gold that needed converting.

The observers were extremely faithful. Pazar sat by the hour in his cab, even when customers in the rain beat on his doors with umbrella handles and called him every sort of scoundrel. Justine shopped herself to exhaustion, wearing out two pairs of shoes but never once complaining. Old Ivan bought coffees for his cronies in a café across the street until he had to submit a plea for funds—and what oceans of
l'express
did to his digestive system a gentleman would not care to describe. They called the couriers A, B, C and D.

B was a sad-looking fellow, with heavy jowls and downcast eyes, nicknamed Boris by the observers. He seemed to all of them so terribly unhappy, as though someone he'd loved had died. He stared at the ground as he carried his satchel through the streets, apparently caught up in a dialogue that went on in his mind. Sometimes his lips actually moved. To test his personality, Khristo ran a prostitute at him one afternoon on the Rue de la Paix, as he returned from making a drop at Floriot. But Boris merely snarled under his breath and avoided her with a wide swerve.

Apparently, the job would have to be done right on the street. The couriers were chained to their satchels, but a small channel-lock bolt cutter could sever the chain quickly enough.

Otherwise, things went more or less well. There were the normal irritations, of course, especially the grave communications problem they experienced. Khristo determined, at that point, that one simply could not be any sort of spy in France because it was impossible to use the telephones. But, all in all, there was nothing very troubling—unless you counted the ham sandwiches. They all had to eat while on the job, and soon discovered that the grand establishments of l'Opéra itself would quickly deplete the operations fund provided by Omaraeff. But Pazar found a family café hidden away in a side street where a reasonable ham sandwich could be obtained—eaten on the premises or carried away. Khristo had lunch there, in the second week of April, and the proprietress made an offhand remark that rang a bell. “Suddenly all the world eats ham sandwiches—one can hardly keep the stuff in stock anymore.” Someone else, it seemed, was eating ham sandwiches.

But he couldn't spot them, though he gave it a try, and he hadn't the personnel to run surveillance on the gold repository
and
the café, so he gave up and left it a question mark. Since the intelligence craft ran so close to life, it was subject to life's coincidences, thus one had to be a good soldier and march ahead, no matter how the hair on the back of the neck might rise.

Spring came the third week in April. Blue rain slanted against the building façades and water streamed down the gutters, the parks smelled of earth when the sun came out for a moment, and a great unvoiced sigh seemed to rise from the city as a green cloud of buds appeared on the trees lining the boulevards. Aleksandra took her entire two-week salary off to the pawnshop and emerged with a radio that worked, like a bad mule, if you beat it. The radio stations competed with one another to intensify the seasonal torment, sending out the saddest songs imaginable from Piaf and the other café singers. Khristo discovered one station that played, sometimes, American jazz, and they listened to Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson's “I Must Have That Man” and Artie Shaw's sinuous “Begin the Beguine.” Such music made both of them feel sexy and ineffably sad in the same moment and they made love like lovers in gothic novels. Meanwhile, the city's deep political malaise, its sense of doom, was now conjoined with the pangs of April and some were overheard to call this time
our final spring
.

In the mornings, Khristo smoked Gitanes and collated observer reports to the sound of the pattering rain. He could find no firm structure in the courier system. They were never together. They took the same route from embassy to repository and home again. The walk took about fourteen minutes. Once at the Floriot repository, the couriers were held up for twenty minutes or so for the inevitable clerical ceremonies—a highly developed French specialty—then took another fourteen minutes to return. During the forty-eight-minute round trip, other couriers sometimes started off on their routes, but all four had never yet operated simultaneously. He studied the covert photographs his operatives had taken. Four unremarkable men in baggy suits. Probably armed. To take one of them would not be too difficult—a kidnapping off the street by hooded toughs. If they found a safe place to hold him, they might reasonably wait the remainder of the forty-eight minutes to see if another courier started out, but each variation on the theme would, of course, substantially increase the danger. There would be police, a lot of them, and they would arrive quickly.

For the finale of the surveillance, old Ivan was sent to the top floor of the building with a pair of gold candlesticks while one of the Russians was subjected to the clerical hocus-pocus. Ivan attempted to haggle over the price and made a thorough pest of himself for a time sufficient to observe an exchange through the security grille, then took his candlesticks and went off in a huff. The banknotes were delivered
en paquet
, but the Russian—the sorrowful Boris, as it happened—insisted on counting the money, and Ivan had silently counted right along with him. It came out to more than ninety thousand francs. At the equivalent of $14.28 U.S. an ounce, the European standard, he had converted almost twenty pounds of gold.

One wet afternoon, Khristo walked with Omaraeff in the Parc Monceau—two black umbrellas moving slowly along the graveled path—and reported to him at length. Gave him a summary of his findings and a set of photographs. After some desultory conversation, they shook hands and parted. At the gate to the park a blind veteran, the breast of his old corporal's tunic covered with medals, stood silently in the drizzle holding a mess-kit plate before him. Khristo put a one-franc coin in the plate and the man thanked him solemnly in an educated voice.

He had an hour before work, so he bought a
Figaro
and stopped in a café and ordered a coffee. He put a sugar lump on the miniature spoon, lowered it just beneath the layer of tan foam, and watched it break into tiny crystals. He was glad the business for Omaraeff was done with; he believed he'd carried it off reasonably well, without getting his hands too dirty. From here on, they were on their own. The surfaces of the café windows were steamy, people going by in the streets looked like shadows.

The front pages of
Le Figaro
were dense with reports of a world in flames: Japanese bombers taking a terrible toll of the Chinese population in Manchuria, the Spanish city of Guernica virtually obliterated by the German pilots of the Condor Legion, Nazi storm troopers in Berlin, standing outside Jewish-owned department stores with rubber stamps and inkpads and forcing shoppers to have their foreheads stamped. Mussolini had made a major speech in Libya, voicing Italian support for Islamic objectives. Bertrand Russell had advised the British public to treat German invaders as tourists, stating, “The Nazis would find some interest in our way of living, I think, and the starch would be taken out of them.”