Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

At 8:30 on the evening of the twelfth, the Brovno pulled into Galati harbor and Khristo walked up a long ramp onto the quay, Ivo at his side. The docks were lit by dazzling floodlights, and he could see a small army of welders crawling around in the skeletons of newly raised cranes, showers of blue sparks raining down through the girders.

“Good luck,” Ivo said. He reached into a pocket and handed over a thick packet of Romanian lei.

Khristo was a little taken aback, it was a great deal of money.

“From your friends,” Ivo said. “It’s a cold world without friends.”

“It is from Drazen Kulic?”

“Him. And others.”

“You will thank him for me?”

“Of course. There is also this: it is suggested that you take a taxi to Sfintu Gheorghe-no need to walk with all that money. Best to show the driver that you have sufficient means for the ride. Then, on your way back, use the same taxi. Lake Murigheol is one place you ought to see, as long as you’ve come this far. Quite beautiful in the spring, it’s said. And you should have it all to yourself-tourists are not expected.”

“Is it close to Sfintu Gheorghe?”

“Some few kilometers. The man who drives the taxi ought to be able to find it.”

They shook hands. “Thank you,” Khristo said.

“My pleasure. Now the work begins-a hundred papers to be stamped by idiots, then we’ll have to shove this wretched pipe all the way back to Yugoslavia. Up stream.” He grimaced at the thought.

“No. Really? For God’s sake, why?”

Ivo shrugged. “We need it more than they do. Let them be satisfied with a fraternal gesture.”

“A lot of work for a fraternal gesture.”

“Yes, but there’s nothing to be done about it.” He nodded back toward the pipe-laden barge, his expression a parody of helplessness. “Wrong gauge,” he said.

There was a bonfire in Sfintu Gheorghe. Four men in shirtsleeves, ties pulled down, were dancing to the music of a violin, each holding the corner of a white handkerchief. The men were very drunk, and it was not a large handkerchief. But the violin was rapturous, the crowd was banging knives and forks and tin pots, and the dancers made up in gravity what they lacked in grace. Two of the men were wearing tinted glasses, and all had holstered pistols beneath their armpits.

Khristo Stoianev, still vibrating from a three-hour taxi ride over a cart track, stood quietly at the edge of the crowd. A heavy woman turned partway toward him and stared uncertainly. He smiled warmly, clapped his hands to the rhythm with broad enthusiasm, and was rewarded with a shy smile in return. He spent some time in this way, letting them notice him, letting them accept him as someone who did not mean them harm. Villagers, he knew, could communicate without speaking-a subtle defense mechanism-and somehow come to a silent decision about the intentions of strangers. You had to let them read your character.

When they began to lose interest in him, he looked over the crowd and picked out the village priest. There would be, in such a place, a triumvirate of leadership: a headman or mayor, a queen of wives, and a local priest. Any one of them would know where Sascha was-if they did not know of him, he was not there. When people grow up in a small village, they learn all the hiding places.

The priest was not hard to find. He was a young man, with hair and beard worn long in the Greek Orthodox manner, and his black cassock fell to the tops of his shoes. Khristo circled the crowd casually until he stood next to him.

“Praise God, Father,” he said, using very slow French.

“My son,” the man acknowledged.

He was flooded with relief. He could not speak Romanian, but he knew that most educated people in the country had a second language-German or French. “A feast,” he said. “Is there a wedding?”

“No, my son,” the priest said. “The village has been blessed today. A good deed has returned to us.”

“And you have guests,” he said. The men with the pistols, sweating in the night air, moved with slow dignity as the violin encountered a brief period of melancholy.

“We are all countrymen,” the priest said. “Praise God.”

Khristo heard clearly the relief in the latter statement. “Is there one guest missing?” he asked gently. “A man with dark hair? A man who has seen the world?” Now he had put himself at the priest’s mercy and feared what he would do next. One shout would be sufficient, he thought, yet who would shout at a feast?

The priest’s eyes sharpened in the firelight and Khristo knew that Sascha was somewhere in the village. His fingers dawdled for a moment by the pocket where the money nested, but instinct told him that such an offer would not be well received. The music picked up and he shouted “Hey!” and clapped his hands.

“Are you a believer?” the priest said.

“I am, Father,” he answered matter-of-factly, “though I have strayed more than I should these last few years.”

The priest nodded to himself. He had been forced to make a decision and he had made it. “You should attend church, my son,” he said, and pointedly broke off the conversation, walking forward a pace or two to be nearer the dancers.

Khristo could see the church; its silver-painted dome reflected light from the bonfire. He moved slowly away from the crowd in the opposite direction, then circled around behind a row of little houses, climbing over garden fences and groping ahead of him for beanpoles and twine. The local dogs loved a feast as well as the villagers, for which he was thankful-the last thing he needed was a dog to wear on his ankle and these yards, he knew, were their sacred territories.

The church was dark and silent. He watched it for a time but it told him nothing-an old mosque, built under Turkish rule, with a cross mounted atop the dome when Christianity returned. He opened the door a few inches, then stepped inside and let it close behind him. It smelled musty, like old straw, and there wasn’t a sound to be heard. “Sascha,” he whispered.

There was no answer.

He regretted, now, leaving his little automatic on the Brovno , but his cover would not allow for it. A Yugoslav river sailor just might turn up in Sfintu Gheorghe-an armed Yugoslav river sailor had better not. There was the faintest trace of light in the church, filtering in from a high window. He moved slowly down an aisle between wooden benches until he reached the altar. “Sascha?”

There was no answer.

To the left of the altar, out of the sightline of the benches, was a pole ladder. He walked to the base of it, slowly, and looked up to see the edge of a loft. “Sascha, it’s Khristo. Stoianev. I’ve come to take you away, to take you to freedom,” he said in Russian.

There was no answer.

Had he left the church? Perhaps the meaning of the priest’s statement had been innocent, the man simply telling him to go to church more often for the good of his soul. He took a step back from the ladder, his thoughts settling on the taxi that waited for him at the edge of the village.

“Sascha Vonets.” He said it in a normal voice. “Are you in this church?”

There was only silence, the muffled sound of the violin, a shout of laughter, barking dogs. He was going to have to climb the ladder. He put one foot on the bottom rung and bounced to make sure it would take his weight, then moved up a rung at a time. “I’m coming up to talk to you,” he whispered into the darkness. A fool’s errand, he thought. The man was likely a thousand miles away while he whispered nonsense into an empty church loft. Still, he kept climbing. He reached the point where he could see over the edge of the loft, but it was very dark, walled off from the high window. He went up another rung and swung one foot onto the boards of the loft. He kicked something, a plate by the sound of it, which went skittering away across the floor. There was an orange flame and a pop and he fell backward, landing on his back and taking the ladder down with him. “Oh no,” he said. He got to his hands and knees and crawled past the altar, down the aisle between the benches, shouldered the door open and rolled himself down the three steps to the dirt street, then wedged himself between the steps and the wall of the church.