Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

It was well after nine when they reached the Kreslice barracks-a set of long, low buildings in the imperial style, built of the honey-colored sandstone so loved by Franz Josef’s architects. “We can probably get something for dinner,” Novotny said, sounding hopeful. But there was a feast laid on for Morath in the officers’ mess. Roast goose, red cabbage with vinegar, beer from a small brewery in Pilsen, and a lieutenant general at the head of the table.

“To friendship between our nations!”

“To friendship!”

Many of the officers were bearded, the style among artillerymen, and many had served on the eastern front in 1914-Morath saw all the medals. Most decorated of all, the general: short and thick and angry. And fairly drunk, Morath thought, with a flushed face and a loud voice. “It gets harder and harder to read the goddamn newspapers,” he said. “Back in the winter, they couldn’t love us enough, especially the French. Czechoslovakia-new hope! Liberal democracy-example for Europe! Masaryk and Benes-statesmen for the ages! Then something happened. Back in July, I think it was, there was Halifax, in the House of Lords, talking about ‘impractical devotion to high purpose.’ Oh shit, we said, now look what’s happened.”

“And it continues,” Novotny said. “The little minuet.”

The general took a long drink of beer and wiped his mouth with an olive-green napkin. “It encourages him, of course. The Reichsfuhrer. The army’s the only thing he ever liked, now he’s gotten tired of watching it march. Now he wants to see it fight. But he’s coming to the wrong neighborhood.”

“Because you’ll fight back.”

“We’ll give him a good Czech boot up his Austrian ass, is what we’ll do. This Wehrmacht, we have films of their maneuvers; they’re built to roll across the plains of Europe. It’s the Poles who ought to worry, and the Russians. Down here, we’ll fight in the mountains. Like the Swiss, like the Spaniards. He can beat us-he’s bigger than we are, no way to change that-but it will take everything he has. When he does that, he leaves the Siegfried Line wide open, and the French can march in with a battalion of cafe waiters.”

“If they dare.” There was laughter at the table.

The general’s eyes glowed. Like Novotny’s pointer bitch, he couldn’t wait to get at the game. “Yes, if they dare- something’s gone wrong with them.” He paused for a moment, then leaned toward Morath. “And what about Hungary? It’s all plains, just like Poland. You don’t even have a river.”

“God only knows,” Morath said. “We barely have an army. For the moment, we depend on being smarter than they are.”

“Smarter,” the general said. He thought it over: it didn’t seem like much. “Than all of them?”

“Hitler killed off the really smart ones, or chased them out of the country. So, for the moment, that’s what we have.”

“Well then, may God watch over you,” the general said.

They gave him a room of his own-above the stables, the horses restless down below-a hard bed, and a bottle of plum brandy. At least, he thought, they didn’t send along “the stableman’s daughter.” He drank some of the brandy, but still he couldn’t sleep. It was thunder that kept him awake, from a storm that never rained yet never moved away. He looked out the window now and then, but the sky was all stars. Then he realized that the Czechs were working at night. He could feel it in the floor. Not thunder, dynamite, the explosions rolling back and forth across the valleys. It was the engineers who kept him awake, blowing the faces off their mountains, building fortifications.

2:30. 3:00. Instead of sleeping, he smoked. He had felt, since he came to the barracks, a certain, familiar undercurrent. Together we live, together we die, and nobody cares which way it goes. He hadn’t felt it for a long time. It wasn’t that he liked it, but thinking about it kept him awake.

*

Just after dawn they were back on the mountain roads, this time in an armored car, accompanied by the general and a pale, soft civilian in a black suit, quite sinister, with tinted eyeglasses and very little to say. A spy, Morath thought. At least, a spy in a movie.

The road was newly made, ripped out of the forest with bulldozers and explosives then surfaced with sawn tree trunks at the low spots. It would break your back but it wouldn’t stall your car. To make matters worse, the armored car rode as though it were sprung with steel bars. “Better keep your mouth closed,” Novotny said. Then added, “No offense meant.”

Morath never saw the fort until they were almost on top of it-cement walls, broken by firing slits, built into the mountainside, and independent blockhouses hidden in the natural sweep of the terrain. The general, clearly proud of the work, said, “Now you see it, now you don’t.”

Morath was impressed and showed it.

The spy smiled, pleased with the reaction.

Inside, the raw smell of new cement and damp earth. As they went down endless flights of stairs, Novotny said, “They have elevators in the Maginot Line. For people, elevators. But here, only the ammunition gets to ride.” A shaft had been carved out of the rock, Morath could see, with a steel platform on cables that could be operated electrically or cranked by hand.

The spy’s German was atrocious. “So many forts are blown up from their own magazines. It need not happen.”

Novotny was joined by a group of officers who manned the fort. As they moved down a long corridor, the general put out a hand so that Morath stayed back from the group. “How do you like my engineer?”

“Who is he?”

“A fortification expert-artist is a better word. From the Savoy. They’ve been building these things since the renaissance-tradition of Leonardo, all that.”

“He’s Italian?”

The general spread his hands. “French by passport, Italian by culture, though he would say Savoyard, and a Jew by birth.” The Savoy, a mountain country between France and Italy, had managed to keep its independence until 1860. “They’ve always permitted Jews to serve as officers,” the general said. “This one was a major. Now he works for me.”

At the end of a cement chamber, under a six-foot ceiling, an embrasure opened out above a forest valley. The Czech officers stood apart, hands clasped behind their backs, as the general and the spy and Morath approached the opening.

“Find a river,” the spy said.

This took time. A pale summer sky, then a ridge top dense with trees, then a green mountainside and a narrow valley that led to the upward slope where the fort had been built. Finally, Morath caught sight of a blue ribbon that wound through the pine trees.

“You have it?”

“Yes.”

“Here. Take.”

He handed Morath a fist-sized wad of cotton. Two soldiers rolled a 105-millimeter mountain gun up to the opening and ran a shell into the breech. Morath tore pieces of cotton from the wad and stuffed his ears, then covered them with his hands. Everyone in the room did the same. Finally, the general mouthed the word ready? Morath nodded and the floor trembled as a tongue of flame leapt from the barrel of the cannon. Even with the cotton, the report was deafening.

Downrange, a flash and a drift of dirty gray smoke. In the river, Morath thought, though he didn’t actually see it happen. Other guns began firing, some from the floor below them, some from the blockhouses, and puffs of smoke floated over the mountainside. The general handed Morath a pair of binoculars. Now he could see fountains of dirt blown forty feet in the air, trees torn from the ground or sheared in two. There was, in fact, a small road that led down to the river. As he watched, a cloud of orange tracers floated past his vision and churned up a storm of dirt spouts on the road.