Alan Furst - Kingdom of Shadows

Novotny laughed. “Then it all belongs to Hitler,” he said. “With good, flat roads running straight to Prague. A hundred kilometers, more or less, about two hours.”

By nightfall they had turned back to the west, headed for the Kreslice barracks and a regimental dinner-a farewell dinner-with the general in attendance. “There may be a speech,” Novotny said.

He paused a moment, peering into the darkness to find his way. They rattled over the crest of a mountain, then Novotny rode the brakes down the steep grade on the other side. “Decin,” he said-a cluster of lights in the trees. This was, Morath thought, one last demonstration: that Czech forces could move east and west without returning to the roads in the valleys. They’d improved the old village paths, used mostly for cows and goats. In the beams of the headlights he could see where holes had been filled with small stones and packed down flat.

“And then, after the speech …” Novotny said.

“Yes?” Oh no, he would refuse.

“Perhaps you would consider …”

Morath was blinded. An explosion of yellow light, then blackness, with the dazzling afterimage of a fiery star. He pressed his hands against his eyes but it wouldn’t fade. Something had burnt the air in front of his face then gone whizzing away into the trees. Novotny yelled-apparently in Czech, Morath didn’t understand. He shoved the door open, then reached for Novotny, who seemed frozen in place. As he grabbed hold of a sleeve there were two pings, metal on metal, and another tracer bullet, this one on the other side of the windshield. Morath could hear the machine gun, firing disciplined, five-round bursts. When he smelled gasoline he pulled with all his strength, dragging Novotny across the seat and out the passenger door.

Lying flat on the ground, he rubbed his eyes as the star began to fade.

“Can you see?” Novotny was now back in German.

“Not much.”

From the front of the car, a loud bang as a round hit the engine block, followed by the sharp smell of steam from the radiator. “Christ,” Morath said. He began to crawl away from the road, pulling Novotny with him. He fought his way into a tangle of vines and branches, a thorn raked him across the forehead. He could now see gray shapes resolving into trees and forest. He took a deep breath-a burned retina meant blindness for life and Morath knew it.

“What about you?” he said.

“Better.” Novotny probed his hairline with an index finger. “The thing actually burned me,” he said.

The machine gunner wouldn’t leave the car alone. He stitched frosted holes in the window glass, then blew out the tires on the traverse. Morath could hear gunfire in the distance, and an orange light flickered on a cloud above the town.

“Is it the invasion?” Morath said.

Novotny snorted with contempt. “It’s the oppressed Sudeten Germans,” he said. “Crying out for justice and equality.”

Morath got to his knees. “We’ll be better off in Decin.”

“I can’t,” Novotny said, “without the stick.”

Morath crawled back to the car, opened the back door, lay flat on the seat, and retrieved the walking stick and the holstered pistol. Novotny was glad to have both. He staggered to his feet, held the butt of the pistol, unsnapped the holster with his teeth, and swept the belt over his shoulder as the pistol slid free. “Now let them come,” he said, laughing at himself and the whole stupid business.

They walked through the woods, Novotny limping along and breathing hard but keeping up with Morath. As it turned out, they were fortunate he was in uniform-a sixteen-year-old militiaman with a machine pistol almost cut them down as they reached Decin.

Headed for the police station, they kept to the alleys, the walls pocked and chipped from small-arms fire. “I knew there was trouble here,” Morath said. “Marching and rioting, you see it in the newsreels. But nothing like this.”

From Novotny, a sour smile. “These are commando units, armed and trained by the SS. You won’t see that in the newsreels.”

The alley ended at a side street, Morath and Novotny crouched at the edge of a stucco wall. To their left, on the other side of a broad avenue, the town school was on fire, bursts of red sparks blown up into the night sky. There were two bodies lit by the firelight, their faces pressed into the angle between the street and the sidewalk. One of them had a bare foot.

“Go ahead,” Morath said. There was some small nobility in this- first across the road was a sacred axiom under fire. The enemy gunners saw the first, shot the second.

“Thanks just the same,” Novotny said. “We’ll go together.”

Even so, Morath took the side toward the gunfire, ran out of bravado midway across, grabbed Novotny around the waist and the two of them galloped to cover-a three-legged race-laughing like madmen as bullets sang past them.

It took them twenty minutes to reach the police station, where a shredded Czech flag hung limp above the barred windows. “Poor fucking thing,” said the Decin chief of police. “These fucking people keep shooting it.”

A strange scene at the station house. Policemen, some off duty when the attack came-one of them firing a rifle out the window with a forgotten napkin tucked in his belt-a few soldiers, local citizens. In the corner, lying flat on a desk, holding a compress to a bloody head wound, was a tall, spare man in a high collar and cutaway coat, one of the lenses in his eyeglasses was cracked in half.

“Our Latin teacher,” the police chief explained. “They beat him up. Forced their way into the school, started throwing Czech schoolbooks out in the street, set them on fire, started singing, you know, and set the school on fire. Then they marched around the neighborhood chanting Teach our children in German while a little man filmed from the roof of a car.

“We did-nothing. We’re under orders up here: don’t let them provoke you. So we smiled and bowed, unprovoked, got the nurse over here to paste the Latin teacher back together, and everything was just perfectly lovely.

“But, of course, they were under orders to provoke us or else, so they went and took a shot at a policeman. He shot back, everyone ran away, and now we have this.”

“You radioed the army?” Novotny said.

The policeman nodded. “They’re coming. In armored cars. But they’ve got four or five of these things to deal with, so it might not be right away.”

“You have weapons for us,” Morath said. It wasn’t a question.

Before the police chief could answer, Novotny spoke to him in rapid Czech. Then, later on, he explained as they moved toward the safe end of town. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But they’d kill me if I let anything happen to you.”

But the safe end of town wasn’t all that safe. At the bottom of a winding street, they found the milkman’s horse and cart, the milkman himself lying facedown on the cobblestones, the back of his jacket flung up over his head. The blinkered horse, standing patiently with his wagonload of milk cans, turned and stared at them as they went past.

The chief of police had directed them to a three-story brick monstrosity, perhaps the grandest house in Decin, on a broad boulevard shadowed by linden trees. The building was guarded by two policemen wearing French-style helmets and armed with rifles. They followed one of them to an overstuffed parlor on the top floor, the walls crowded with oil portraits of very fat people in very expensive clothing. As Morath and Novotny settled in, a local functionary came puffing up the stairs carrying two ledgers, a clerk and a secretary close behind him with two more. Still wheezing, he stopped dead, bowed politely, then spun on his heel and hurried off.