Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

Gun in hand, he crawled along the curve of the bulwark until he reached the pilot’s cabin, which was set just forward of the small deckhouse that served as the tug’s living quarters. Inside, a woman was at the helm, adjusting the large spoked wheel, watching the water ahead of her with unmoving eyes.

A bearded man in a black uniform sat against the far wall of the cabin, eyes closed, knees pulled up, hands clasped across his stomach, chest moving slightly as he breathed. An old-fashioned machine gun-a pepecha , with rough wooden stock and pan magazine-lay at his feet, and a trickle of blood ran across the deck from somewhere beneath him.

The pilot glanced at Khristo, then returned her attention to the river. She was immense, a solid block of a woman in carpet slippers and black socks and a flowered print dress that hung down like a tent. Above the socks, her white ankles were webbed with blue veins-the result, he realized, of a lifetime spent standing at the helm. Her face, in profile, featured an enormous bulb of a nose, a massive, square jaw, and salt and pepper hair scissored in a line across the nape of her neck. She was, he guessed, well into her fifties.

She spoke to him briefly in a language he did not at first understand, then realized was Hungarian. Next, she tried him in rapid German. He shook his head dumbly and started to shiver in the cool dawn air. “Who is he?” he said in Czech, nodding at the man on the floor.

“Hlinka,” she said. The Hlinka, he knew, was a Slovakian fascist militia that fought alongside the Germans.

“Your guard?” he asked, purposely vague. A guard could protect you or hold you prisoner.

She declined the trap. “What do you want?” she said in Czech. “Here it is forbidden to refugees,” she added. With authority, just in case he was something the Germans had thought up to test her loyalty.

He did not answer immediately. She shrugged, went back to work, changing course a point or two to avoid a whitewater snag some way upriver.

“I want to go east, mother,” he said, using a term of respect.

“I am not your mother,” she said. “And they are fighting east of here. And if you try to shoot that thing it will piss on your foot.”

He looked down to see water dripping from the barrel of the Czech automatic. He stuck it back in his belt, then reached into his pocket and brought out the gold coins-there were sixteen, each a solid ounce-and sprayed them across the metal shelf by the helm so that they made a great ringing clatter.

She moved her lips as she counted them, then gave him a good, long look, taking in his worker’s clothing-wool jacket and pants, heavy boots, peaked cap stuffed in side pocket-and staring him full in the face before she went back to watching the river.

“Who are you, then?” she said. “And spare me the horseshit, if you don’t mind.” Her tone was courteous, but bore the suggestion that she could throw him back overboard anytime she felt like it. He looked at her arms. She could do it easily, he realized.

“I am from the river, like you.” He said it in Bulgarian.

She nodded and thought it over. “That is a fortune,” she said, switching into Russian, knowing he would understand it. “A lot of gold for a river boy.” She paused for a time, ruminating on things, as the tug slid past the snag. She’d given it just enough room for safety, not so much as to waste fuel.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“My official name you don’t need to know,” she said. “On the river I am called Annika.”

“If you turn your boat around, Annika, they will think that you are going back downstream for the barge, and they will not send a patrol boat out from Bratislava.”

“Smart, too,” she said, “for a river boy.”

He did not press her further. She picked up one of the coins and studied it front and back, then tossed it onto the shelf. She mumbled to herself in Hungarian for a time-curses, he suspected, from the choppy rhythm of it, aimed at Germans, Russians, gold, rivers, boats, him, and likely herself and her fate as well-then spun the wheel toward the far bank. The rudder responded and the tug swung slowly in the direction of the shore, the course change preparatory to coming about and heading east.

“My Hlinka watchdog,” she said, “he still lives?”

Khristo looked at the man. “Yes,” he said.

“He crawled in here for company while he died,” she said. “That much we give him.”

He nodded his agreement.

“When he’s gone,” she continued, “pitch him overboard. On my boat, you must work.”

She was a small tug, so wide-beamed in the middle and high in the bow she seemed half submerged. Her current name, K -24 , was just barely visible amid the rust stains and moss green patches on her hull. She had been designated K -24 in 1940, when Hungary had joined the Axis powers. Aside from a few gunboats and a small fleet of tugs and barges, Hungary had no navy. It had no coastline and no access to the sea, though it was governed by an admiral, Miklos Horthy, throughout the war.

The tug had been launched in 1908 at a dockyard near Szeged and christened the Tisza , after the river on which the city was located. She was forty feet long, built low to the water in order to slide beneath the old Danube bridges. Her steam engine was Austrian, a simple boiler that put forth 200 horsepower on a good day and would burn coal or wood but in its time had run on straw, hay, cotton waste or anything else that could be set on fire. When the Americans were bombing up and down the river-hitting the Romanian oil transfer points at Giorgiu and Constanta, finally taking out the oilfields at Ploesti-she had been regularly strafed, something about the slow progress of a tug inciting turret gunners to a frenzy as they passed above her. One fighter pilot-“a splendid idiot” was the way Annika put it-had spent the better part of a half hour machine-gunning a bargeload of gravel, to no particular point, having first nearly melted his barrels in fruitless attacks on the Tisza’s pilothouse, which was covered by a two-inch sheet of iron plating painted to look like a wooden roof. The Tisza had, in four years of war, taken its share of hits at the waterline, in the engine boiler and the smokestack, but these were easily enough patched.

She was, Annika admitted, an old lady and a noisy one. Her pistons hammered relentlessly as she ran, and you could hear her coming a good way off, ticking like a clock gone mad. “A dirty old lady,” Annika’s husband had called her, in the days before the war. Her stack-chopped off a few feet above the roof level of the pilothouse because of this or that bridge-trailed sooty clouds of smoke into the sky, black, gray, or white, depending on what they had to burn that day.

Leaving Bratislava, the smoke was black as they used up the last of the Czechoslovakian coal. “From here on, it’s brushwood,” Annika told him, casting a meaningful eye toward the double-bitted ax that stood in one corner of the pilothouse. “She’ll run on trash, if she must.” The Danube grew its own fuel, abundant softwoods-alder, willow, big-leaf maple-that lined its banks and drank its water. It was light, fibrous stuff that grew up in a year and burned up in a minute but it was abundant, and the Tisza had never minded it. “Thank the Lord for the current,” Annika said, “and for a load of one river boy rather than a barge of sand.”

Just south of the Bratislava docks, the river became the north-south boundary between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, passing entirely into Hungarian territory at the town of Sturovo. In midafternoon, Khristo hid belowdecks, behind a coal bin next to the boiler, where he at last dried out while the Hungarian border guards came aboard to joke with Annika and consume several bottles of beer and a tin of jam. When they’d gone, Annika came down the hatchway and showed him how to stoke the boiler and manage the primitive gearing system that changed propeller pitch. “Three speeds,” she said, “all slow. And if we have to go backward, I come and show you. You must be a little bit the mechanic.”