Alan Furst: Night Soldiers

Khristo Stoianev held the letter in one hand, the envelope, still sealed, in the other. The letter read: Meet at noon by Spassky Tower .

Ozunov could feel his heart beating. It was the throb of the prospector finding golden flecks in an ordinary rock. What was this? A magnificent discovery, to be wrapped carefully and delivered, in all humility, to his superiors? Or something else. Something bad. Something very, very bad indeed. He began to sweat. Closed his eyes, reviewed the last few weeks in his mind.

Khristo had discovered the small, unsealed slit at the side of the envelope where the glue line ended. He had squeezed the envelope so that the slit bulged slightly; peering inside, he had seen the fold of the letter within. Carefully, he ran one needle inside the fold, then inserted the second needle between the top of the fold and the upper edge of the envelope flap so that the needles sandwiched the fold of the letter between them. With great patience, he began to rotate both needles, and soon the letter became a tube of paper with the needles at its core. When he had the whole letter, he drew it toward him through the slit.

Ozunov dismissed the others.

Stood in front of his desk. Folded his hands and tapped his thumbs together rapidly. From years of school, Khristo knew this situation intimately and it puzzled him. What had he done wrong? Clearly he had done something , they didn’t push their glasses up on their foreheads and shut their eyes and pinch the bridges of their noses like that unless you had made a very great botch of it indeed.

“So, Stoianev, tell Uncle Vadim. We’ll talk man to man. Yes?”

Uncle Vadim? He said nothing.

“Where did you learn it?”

“Just here. I, ah, it revealed itself. The solution.”

“A lie.”

“No, comrade Major, I must disagree with you.”

“You think me stupid?”

“No sir.”

“Do not use that form.”

“Beg pardon, comrade Major.”

“Do you know, Stoianev, what is done in the Lubianka? In the cellars? What they do with the hoses? It takes no time at all. You will confess that your mother is a wolf, that your father is a dragon, that you keep the czar’s dick hidden in a Bible. You will confess that you fly through the air and consort with witches. You will tell them who taught you such tricks-when and where and what you had for dinner. You understand?”

“Yes, comrade Major. I learned it here, just now.”

“I give you one last chance: tell me the truth.”

“From the first moment, it seemed the obvious way.”

Ozunov took a deep breath and exhaled, dropped his gold-rimmed glasses and settled them on his nose. “Very well,” he said, “I must offer you my congratulations.” He thrust his hand forward and Khristo shook it once, formally. “Now we are both dead men,” he added stoically, and gestured for Khristo to leave the room.

The news traveled. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He found himself regaining some of what he had lost when abandoned by the admiring Antipin. Even Marike relented. Took his hand and led him down to the warm, dusty boiler room where, on a scratchy blanket, he received a Soviet Hero’s reward.

In the following weeks, Major Ozunov himself began to thaw. Khristo and his comrades chased each other through the streets of Moscow. Following each other and being followed. Eluding their pursuers, checking their backs in shop windows, running dead-drops in the parks, brushing hands in fast passes in Krasnaya Presnya Park. At the militia station near the school, the lieutenant said, “I see Ozunov is at it again.” Denunciations poured in from angry citizens. I saw them pass an envelope, comrade, just as bold as brass in clear daylight. Foreigners, I’d say they were. And most brazen . They were broken up into teams, competed in discovering and penetrating each other’s operations. Semmers gave Goldman a bloody nose when he caught him stealing a master cipher. A baker reported that a group of hooligans had kidnapped a tall Polish fellow in his shop.

And Khristo won. And won again. It was Khristo’s Red Star team that accepted the prize copy of Lenin’s speeches. You could dodge through crowds, slither beneath a wagon, crouch down in a phalanx of cyclists, it did not seem to matter. You looked in the reflective shop window and there he was-just near enough, just far enough-doing something or other that made it seem he had lived on this street all his life. Twenty of them chased him into the Byelorussian railroad station on Tverskaya Street. Then, three hours later, trooped back to the dormitory empty-handed. To find Khristo waiting for them in the parlor, wearing a stiff-billed train conductor’s cap. They knew him now for what he was, the best among them. They had seen it before, wherever they came from: the best in the classroom, the best on the soccer field, and they acknowledged his preeminence.

For his part, he learned to wear the star and honor its responsibilities. He encouraged the slow learners, lent a secret hand to those arrayed against him in competitions, and dismissed his successes as pure luck. Major Ozunov, in the hearing of other students, called him Khristo Nicolaievich, which put a seal on his ascendancy. Inspired by all this attention, he even managed to learn a little French.

On the last day of December it snowed a blizzard and he was summoned to Ozunov’s private office. Since dawn, kopeck-size snowflakes had drifted down the windless air. Through the major’s leaded windows-his office had formerly been the master bedroom of the once grand house-Khristo watched the street whiten and fill.

Ozunov stuffed the bowl of a pipe with tobacco, then lit it carefully with a large wooden match. As the office filled with sweet thick smoke, the major produced a chessboard and pieces.

“Do you play, Khristo Nicolaievich?”

“Not really, comrade Major. In Vidin, there was no time to learn.”

“You know the moves, though. What each piece may do.”

“Of course I know that, comrade Major.”

“Good. Then let us try a game. What do you say?”

“I will do the best I can, comrade Major.”

“Mmm,” he said around the pipe stem, “that’s the proper spirit.”

He offered his closed fists: Khristo picked the left hand and played black.

He had learned the moves, back in Vidin, from Levitzky the tailor, who called it “the Russian game.” Thus, the old man pointed out, the weak were sacrificed. The castles, fortresses, were obvious and basic; the bishops moved obliquely; the knights-an officer class-sought power in devious ways; the queen, second-in-command, was pure aggression; and the king, heart of it all, a helpless target, dependent totally on his forces for survival.

Khristo had virtually no inkling of strategy, but he resolved to be the best opponent he could. The object of the game, he knew, was not to slay the other king but to put the opponent in a position where he had no choice but to submit. He had overheard one of Vidin’s more daring wits describe checkmate as “all that Russian foot-kissing business.” Khristo’s notion of a chess tactic was to sneak a pawn down one side of the board-hoping for a distracted or mortally unobservant foe-and quick make it a queen. At heart, the strategy of checkers thrown in well over its head. Failing that, he liked to send his castles hurtling back and forth, up and down, in obvious but savage forays, hoping to shock a piece or two from his opponent. The knights he rarely used-they had a herky-jerky motion he distrusted: things shouldn’t go straight and then cat-corner.

Ozunov attacked down the left side of the board, giving up two pawns, but pinning Khristo’s castle down with a bishop. Khristo wasted two turns hip-hopping his queen around the pawn rank-stopping to take Ozunov’s apparently suicidal pawns-for he liked it to have an unobstructed field of fire. Ozunov reacted to this provocation with apparent caution, breaking off his bishop’s attack on the castle, drawing the piece back to safety. It was Khristo’s theory that a succession of entirely random moves might startle the opponent, give him pause, make him think you had some obscure trick up your sleeve. Ozunov pondered the board, smoke curling upward from his pipe, chin resting on folded hands, intent once again on his own attack. So intent that Khristo had a little flurry of victories, took a pawn and a bishop with his galloping castle, made Ozunov move to defend his king. He seemed, somehow, to have taken the initiative. Perhaps he really could play. He stared out the white window, hypnotized by the slow drift of the snowflakes, then forced his attention back to the game-he could not allow Ozunov to see that his mind wandered. Where was Marike? He’d not seen her at breakfast.