Night Soldiers (53 page)

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.

Lunch and dinner at the Novy Bor on March 21.

A long, narrow room, windows white with steam so that people in the street passed like ghosts, black and white tiles of the floor awash with water from muddy boots, over a hundred people talking in low voices, the clatter of trays, a portrait of Hitler on the yellow wall above the bubbling tea urn.

And again on March 22, this time aborting a pass from Hlava scheduled for noon.

A pass successfully managed at the fallback location on the morning of March 23, a page torn from a copybook pressed into his hand:

1. New plant directives specify that workers absenting themselves from the factory for any reason shall be charged with economic sabotage against the Reich and hung without trial, such hangings to take place directly outside the factory as example to all workers
   .
   

2. Two N40 milling machines down after gears sabotaged with emery grit
   .
   

3. Repair of six ME-109 fuselages delayed by oxyacetylene shortage. Resupply promised for week of 9 April. Old-fashioned metal brazing techniques used instead of welding and parts shipped
   .
   

4. ME-110 wing trucked in on 18 March appears to have taken intensive ground fire from small-bore weapons. Number 770 j-12 on wing
   .
   

Lunch on March 23 at Novy Bor. Khristo sat against the wall opposite the buffet counter. As he was stalling through the last of his beer, Josef Voluta appeared at the table with a bowl of soup on a tray. Almost immediately after he sat down, two old men joined them at the table.

“Salt, please,” Voluta said, handing him a slip of paper beneath the table. Khristo passed him the salt.

“Thank you,” Voluta said.

Khristo waited a few minutes and sipped his beer in silence, then rose from the table and went into the toilet, locked the door, and read the small slip of brown paper. When he emerged, Voluta was gone. He sat back down at the table and finished the beer before leaving.

Could this be the man, he wondered, that he had known at Arbat Street? His face was gray and lean, features sharpened, eyes too bright. The backs of his hands showed patches of glossy red skin, the mark of recently healed burns. He had eaten his soup hunched over, face close to the bowl, holding the spoon in his fist, moving with a steady, constant motion—a man servicing a machine. Khristo fought the sudden urge, nearly a compulsion, to find a mirror and look at his face.

On one edge of the message from “An NKVD Colonel” a different hand had written the word
Sascha
. In writing that Khristo took to be Voluta's, a message had been penciled on the back of the paper:
Jiráskuv bridge, March 24, 8:05
P.M.
, then 9:1 j, then 10:20. If not, good luck
. The message was written in Russian.

My God, Khristo thought. Sascha.

On the night of March 24, 1945, a De Havilland Mosquito circled at 35,000 feet above the city of Prague. All armament had been removed from the airplane, marginally increasing its range. Even so, the plane would land at the OSS field at Bari with its fuel tank nearly empty, the round trip between the two cities barely within its capacity. The pilot and navigator wore fur gloves and sheepskin jackets and breathed from an oxygen tank—their problem was altitude, not hostile anti-aircraft fire. Even if the Germans could hear them, they couldn't see them that high up.

A four-minute message from the FELDSPAR operative, crouching somewhere on a roof down below, was recorded on a wire-spool machine and flown back to OSS headquarters in Bari. The FELDSPAR committee, responsible for oversight of the operation, was waiting anxiously for the recording. They spent fifteen minutes discussing the information, then sent it on to the typists and clerks. Data on German war production capabilities in Occupied Czechoslovakia was immediately prepared for distribution to various analysis groups. A rather peculiar addition to the message, concerning an NKVD colonel offering material on Soviet intelligence operations in exchange for exfiltration from someplace in Romania, was only briefly discussed. Someone said it sounded like a provocation, somebody else wondered what the hell the FELDSPAR operative was doing with stuff like that—who was he talking to?