Blood of Victory (24 page)

Had he been in love with Nicolette? Jean Marc wasn’t sure. Well, maybe, in a way. At what point did desire become something more? She wasn’t the stableman’s daughter, far from it. Still, they belonged to different worlds, different worlds, and it made anything beyond a
liaison
impossible. Yet that innocence, that carefree giving, had taken him prisoner. So many times they were together for the last time! What could he have done differently? What? And, the longer it went on, the harder it was to let go of it. Did Serebin see that? Did he understand?

The
homme de confiance
unburdened his heart, the scotch whiskey sank low in the bottle. Could it be stronger than vodka? Across the table, Jean Marc’s face grew blurred and soft, and Serebin found himself slightly dizzy, leaning hard on the table. Jean Marc drank right along with him, but maybe he was used to it. And if Serebin got a little drunk, so what?
I am being murdered,
he thought.

What?

Where had
that
come from? Madness, no?
See
what a life of secrecy does to you!

He stood up, gestured toward the door at the back of the café. A visit to the
petit coin,
the little room.

Once there, he caught himself looking around for a window. His head swam—what was he going to do? Climb out into the alley? Run off into the night?

When he came back out, Jean Marc wasn’t at the table. Serebin couldn’t believe he’d simply left. At the bar, maybe. No. At, for whatever reason, another table? No. Only the two Arab men, now playing dominoes. Nothing unusual about them—heavy and dark, in the slightly mismatched coats and trousers they all wore. Serebin stared a moment too long—one of them glanced up at him, then looked away.

“Did my friend leave?” he asked the proprietor.

“He said he was late,” the man told him. “To tell you he was sorry, but he had to be off.”

“Oh.”

“It’s all paid for.”

Well, no point in staying there by himself. Serebin said good night to the proprietor, then went out the door.
Now where?
He remembered the trouble he’d had finding the place—a maze of unfamiliar streets, this one went off at an angle, that one cut across the other. He should have paid attention, on the way, but he hadn’t. The Métro was this way? He wasn’t sure. As he walked to the corner—maybe the name of the street would jog his memory—he heard a door close, somewhere behind him. When he turned around, he saw the two men standing in front of the café, talking.
Just two friends, out for the evening.

He started walking. In Paris, you always found a boulevard, sooner or later. Follow the boulevard and you would eventually come to a Métro station. Or, he thought, ask somebody. But there was no one to ask. It was probably very busy here during the day—the men who worked at the abattoirs, the local people. But not now. Everybody had gone home.

The rue Mourette. All right, we’ll take that.

The two men came along behind him. Headed for the Métro? Well, ask them. No. But they were walking a little faster than he was, not so much, just a little. So, give them time, let them catch up, and then he could ask them if they knew where the Métro was.

He’d seen knives, once or twice. One time in particular, in Madrid, during the civil war, he could never quite forget. It had been very sudden, when it happened, or he would have looked away. But, once you saw what you saw it was too late. The idea bothered him. Too easy to imagine, to imagine what went on, just at the moment, what it would feel like.

He could hear them, back there. Their steps. That’s how quiet it was.
Run.

Couldn’t quite get himself to do that. Almost, but it seemed crazy, to take off down the street. Still, he could hear them. One of them talking, low and guttural. The other one laughed. At him? Because he’d speeded up? He came to a corner, now it was the rue Guzac. Ugly name. A bad street to die on. He looked up at the windows, but they were dark. Behind him, the conversation was louder.

He crossed the street, head down, hands in pockets, and headed back where he’d come from. Toward the café. Easy enough to see it, earlier in the evening. Even with blackout curtains over the windows, light showed around the edges. Where was it? Had he taken another street? No, there it was, but it was dark now. Closed. Somewhere behind him, the two men crossed the street and were now walking in the same direction he was.

The man in Madrid had screamed, he had really screamed, loud. But then it was cut off sharp, because of what happened next. Serebin took his hands out of his pockets, could feel his heart hammering inside him. Why was this going to happen to him?
Jean Marc.
He walked faster, but it didn’t matter.

He turned a corner and started to run, then he saw a woman standing in the shadow of a doorway. Broad flat face, with lipstick and rouge, and stiff, curly hair. She wore a leather coat, had a bag on a shoulder strap. When their eyes met, she tilted her head slightly to one side, a question.

“Bonsoir,”
he said.

“All alone, tonight?”

“Yes. Can we go somewhere?”

“It’s fifty francs,” she said. “Why are you breathing like that? Aren’t sick, are you?”

“No.”

“Those your pals?”

The two men waited. Felt like standing in the street and talking to each other, nothing wrong with that.

“No, it’s just me.”

“Salops,”
she said. She didn’t like the type.

“Your man around?”

“Across the street. Why?”

“Let’s go see him.”

“Why? He won’t like it.”

“Oh, he’ll like it all right. Costs money, for me to get what I want.”

“What’s that?”

“Maybe another girl. Maybe somebody watches it.”

“Oh.”

“All right?”

“Sure. Whatever you want, it’s only money.”

“Three hundred francs, how does that sound?”

The woman gave a sharp whistle and her pimp stepped from a doorway. About eighteen, with a cap slanted over one eye and a smart little face.

That did it, the two men started to walk away. They were very casual, just out for an evening stroll. One of them looked back over his shoulder and grinned at Serebin.
We’ll see you some other time.
Could they simply have intended to rob him?

The pimp was paid the three hundred francs, and all he had to watch was Serebin, disappearing down the stairway of a Métro station.

By post:

Zollweig Maschinenfabrik AG
Gründelstrasse 51
Regensburg
Deutsches Reich

28 February, 1941

Domnul Emil Gulian
Enterprise Marasz-Gulian
Strada Galati 10
Bucuresti
Roumania

Dear Sir:

We are pleased to accept your offer of Reichsmarks 40,000 for two Model XIV Rheinmetall turbine steam boilers. You may have complete confidence that these have been regularly inspected and maintained to a high order and we trust you will find them in perfect working condition.

On receipt of your draft in the above-named amount, we will ship, according to your instruction, by river barge, no later than 14 March, with arrival at the port of Belgrade expected by 17 March. All export permissions and licenses will be obtained by our office.

We wish you success in your new venture and, should you have further inquiries, please address them to me personally.

Most respectfully yours,
Albert Krempf
Managing Director
Zollweig Maschinenfabrik AG

A Vidocq/Lille steam turbine was available in Bratislava, manufactured in 1931, rated at 10,000 kilowatts of power delivered, 33 feet in length, 13 feet wide, 11 feet high, weighing 237,000 pounds. The Czech manager of the foundry guaranteed performance, documentation, and shipping. And well he should, Polanyi thought, at the price they were paying. Polanyi wondered how they would go about replacing it, with the war using up production capacity at an astonishing rate, but that wasn’t his problem. Maybe it was a backup system, maybe this, maybe that—in the event, the opportunity was too good to pass up and no doubt they had something in mind.

As in Budapest, where agents for Marasz-Gulian located three turbine boilers, of similar dimension, with one old fellow, formerly the pride of the Esztergom Power Authority, weighing in at “over four hundred thousand pounds.” They rather thought. And rescued, just in time, from the scrapyard.

“Let’s see them haul that great fucker off the bottom,” Stephens said, at the restaurant overlooking the wharves. He handed Polanyi a page cut from an old Hungarian catalogue. A photograph of a giant turbine. A little man with a mustache, wearing a gray uniform, stood beside it, dwarfed by its size. “From London, by diplomatic pouch,” Stephens explained. Then added, wistfully, “Such strange and lovely things they have in London.”

Six turbines, then, with a seventh available in Belgrade, from a Serbian steel mill. “Fourteen years old and no longer suitable to our needs, but perfectly reliable.” The decision to use steam turbines, a race of giants in the Land of Industry, had come after some consideration. Bagged cement would break loose from its load and tumble away in the current long before it turned to concrete, and there was no credible reason to ship concrete block to Roumania, where some of it, at least, was manufactured. Similarly, fire brick for blast furnaces, which weighed, as it happened, substantially less than common brick. “And locomotives,” Stephens had said, “are, alas, far too likely to be traveling by rail.” Scrap iron was currently in demand for German tanks, stone was quarried in Roumania. “The world is lighter than one thinks,” Polanyi grumbled, poking at his eggplant.

And the cursed river could never really decide how deep it was, they found. Still, everyone, Herr Doktor Finkelheim, the Roumanian pilot, and specialists at universities in Birmingham and Leeds, agreed that the Stenka ridge was the place. Kilometer 1030. Dangerously shallow at the end of winter, before the spring rains left the river swollen and high in its banks. So, a barge with six feet of draft and six feet above the waterline, crowned with an eleven-foot-high turbine, would come to rest at twenty-three feet. A menace to navigation. Even if, in the course of the accident, one of the barges turned on its side—disaster!—they’d have six more down there, pulled under by the sinking tug. A great navigational mess, surely, but an expensive one to arrange.

“Don’t worry about that,” Stephens said. The Special Operations Executive had a considerable imprest from Treasury, and he was, for the time being, their fair-haired boy.

It was Ibrahim who was sent to Bucharest to meet with Gulian. “Stenka ridge,” he said. “No question. An Austrian company dredges the ship canal and, in the present state of politics, now more than ever. They are always at it.” As for the appropriate cargo, Gulian shrugged and said, “Well, a steam boiler.” He laughed. “If what you want is sheer clumsiness, the most frustrating beast you could imagine, that’s the steam boiler. Monsters, those things, ask your local industrialist.”

Bought new?

“No, impossible. They take months to order, to build, to deliver—a
cauchemar.
”

Then?

“In all commerce there are shadow markets, informal dealings between buyer and seller. In all products, machinery as much as any other. I can think of at least two agencies who work this area. And the war has made no difference to them—believe me, they prosper in war. They live on the margin, these men. Hang around your outer office, read the newspaper, discuss the day’s events with your secretary. There used to be one—Brugger, was that it? Always with a toothpick in the mouth. He’d wait for me to go out for lunch. Hello, how are you, heard the one about the plumber and the midget? Want to buy something? Got anything you want to sell? Truth is, you don’t need them, until you need them, and then you really need them.”

So then, who will actually buy the turbines?

“That’s a problem. A paper company won’t work, because the people who watch these things—import licenses and so forth—are not stupid. ‘XYZ,’ they’ll say, ‘who’s that?’ Which means, if you don’t have months to build up a shell business, you’ll need the real thing. So, it’s either me, or someone like me.”

And what happens after the “accident”?

“Delay, temporize, misunderstand, deny, pull your hair out, declare bankruptcy, then run like hell. After all, what makes you think that what works in business won’t work in war?”

Yes, but there’s no history of Gulian, doing things like that.

True. “But go see my enemies, they’ll tell you they always knew it would come to that. So, finally, they’ll be right.”

A lot of enemies, were there?

“I’m rich and successful,” Gulian said. “You fill in the rest.”

So, through various banks, in Geneva and Lisbon, the money began to move.

28 February. At the IRU office, a quiet morning. On the radio, an endless suite and variations for guitar, accompanied, now and then, by the rattle of a newspaper, and an occasional, mournful, ping from the tepid radiator, remembering better days. In the window, a lead-colored sky. Serebin dropped by that morning because he had nowhere else to go and nothing to do. This was called, in the parlance of the clandestine world,
waiting.
He needed urgently to speak with Polanyi—to tell him what had happened at the café by the abattoirs, to warn him, perhaps, of a dangerous change of heart, or to be scoffed at, gently, for seeing things that weren’t there. But, short of an emergency wire to Helikon Trading, there was nothing he could do. He’d been left in Paris, awaiting assignment, dangling. Had the operation been, for whatever reason, canceled? Maybe. And the way he would be told about it was—silence.
No further contact.
Would Polanyi do that? Yes, that was precisely what he would do. That was, he suspected, the traditional, the classical, way it was done.

He considered the wire. Wrote and rewrote it in the Aesopian language they used, oblique and commonplace—
representative important principal currently unwilling to proceed.
In other words,
the bastard tried to kill me.
No, it wouldn’t work. Or, worse, it would work, and stop everything cold for no good reason.