Alan Furst: Night Soldiers

Antipin, meanwhile, pulled the board away from the door and a group of coughing men came out in swirls of smoke and cinders. It was not difficult to jerk the nails from the wood, a kick from within would have done it, but the board had been cleverly positioned, across the knob, so that kicks against the door were ineffectual, and no one had thought to kick at the knob, an awkward target.

Khristo watched as the board was worked free of the door. It took him a moment to understand the device, it was too simple. But, when he did understand, something in the knowledge turned his stomach. Somebody, somewhere, in appearance a man like himself, had thought this method through. Had studied the problem: how to obstruct a door when setting fire to a house full of people so that those within could not escape, and had found a solution, and applied it. That there were those in the world who would study such things Khristo Stoianev had never understood. Now he did.

The man coming down the hill was Khosov the Policeman, brother of Khosov the Postman who kept the rhythm for the National Union parades. He was a policeman because no one had known what else to do with him. He was a man whose mouth never closed, who stared dreamily around him, seemingly amazed at a world full of ordinary things. He was slow. Everything had to be figured out. But when he did figure it out-and eventually he always did, especially if there was somebody around to help him-he could be swept away by a blind, insentient rage. At one time he had been much persecuted by children, until he beat one little boy very nearly to death with a broom handle.

The men stood around and watched the house burn. There was nothing to be done about it. A few buckets of water were tossed on neighboring roofs, to protect the dry reeds from embers floating through the night air. The widow knotted her hands in the binding of her apron and held it in her mouth while she wept, her wet cheeks shining in the firelight. The men around her were silent. They had brought a disaster down on her, and there was nothing to be done about that either.

Policeman Khosov came down the hill and stopped ten feet from Antipin. His eyes searched the crowd carefully; one had better not make a mistake here, as one’s fellows watched from the road above. They were counting on him, trusted him to go it alone; he wasn’t going to-not if he had to stand here all night-let them down.

One to another, each in turn, he peered at them, his face knotted with concentration, sweat standing on his brow with the effort of it, mouth open as always. Even though it might be you he sought, the sheer agony of the process made you want to help him.

Finally, he discovered Antipin, his eyes widening with the amazement of having gotten it right. He pointed with his arm fully extended, like an orator.

“You,” he said. “You, communist, come with me now.” His other hand rested on the butt of a large revolver in a holster.

Antipin made no move. There was a long silence, the fire crackling and popping as the dry roof timbers caught.

“Did you hear me?”

Antipin took a step forward, inclined his head toward Khosov and said, “What did you say?”

“I said come with me. No trouble, now.”

Antipin took another step. The fire played shadows on his back. He spoke very slowly, as to a child. “Go back up this hill, you braying ass, and tell your friends up there that their mouths will be full of dirt. Can you remember that?” The “mouths full of dirt” referred to events in the grave.

They watched Khosov’s face. Watched the slow painful process as the information was worked at, disassembled, examined. When comprehension arrived, his hand tightened on the butt of the pistol but it was much too late.

Antipin flowed easily through the space between them and punched Khosov in the heart, a downward motion, as though his balled fist were a hammer. It blew the breath from Khosov’s mouth and made him sit down and wrap his arms around his chest. Antipin leaned over and took the revolver from the holster and smashed it to pieces on a rock. Khosov groaned, then hunched over, struggling to breathe. Antipin reached down and put two fingers inside his nostrils and jerked his head upright. Khosov gave a shrill little cry like a hurt animal.

“Now you go up there and tell them what I said. That they shall eat the dirt.”

Antipin let him go and he managed to stand up, still gasping for air. Blood ran freely from his nose and he tried to stop it with his hand. He gave Antipin one terrified glance-this is a thing that makes pain, stay away from it always-then turned and scrabbled up the hill, holding his nose, head turtled down between his shoulders like a child running away from a beating.

Khristo watched him go, then turned to look at the men around him, illuminated by the light of the burning house. They coughed and spit, trying to get the smoke out of themselves. Someone had dragged the man from the windowsill where he had fallen and laid his smoking body on the ground. He had been burned black in the fire, but those who had heard the sound of the iron bar knew he had been beyond feeling anything at all. Up on the road, the group of silhouettes shifted nervously as Khosov the Policeman scurried toward them.

Khristo sensed clearly that this was not the end of it, that it would go on, that each act would become a debt to be repaid with interest. Nikko’s death had seemed to him, to his family, a tragedy of bad fate-like a drowning, or a mother taken at childbirth. You had to live with death, God gave you no choice. Today it was your turn, tomorrow it would touch your neighbor; thus people gathered around you, held you up with their spirit, tried to fill the empty place. He now understood that Nikko’s death was a tragedy of a different kind. It was part of something else; there was a connection, a design, at first faint, now much clearer. The unknown intelligence that conceived a method of blocking doors could also see a purpose in the murder of a fifteen-year-old for laughing at a parade.

As Khosov climbed toward the road, a man near Khristo said, “We had better stand together here.”

The old fisherman took a step back. “I am no part of this.”

“Go home then,” someone said. “They know where you live.”

“I do not oppose them. I will tell them that.”

“Then there will be no problem,” the man said, a sour irony in his voice.

On the road, Khosov and the others climbed onto the back of the truck, which stuttered to life and bounced away down the dirt road.

Khristo found Antipin at his shoulder. “Come with me,” the Russian said. “Let us take a little walk together.”

They walked down to the river, past the sagging pole docks, to the sand beach below the walls of the old fort, called Baba Vida-Grandma Vida-built by the Turks three hundred years earlier, though some of the inner walls had blocks set by Greek and Roman hands.

It was well after midnight, a stiff breeze blew off the river, they could just make out the dark bulk of the Romanian shore on the other side. Antipin rolled two cigarettes and gave one to Khristo, lit a wooden match with his thumbnail. They bent toward each other to protect the flame from the wind. Their cigarettes glowed in the darkness as they walked along the beach.

“You understand, do you not,” Antipin said, “that they meant for me to kill him.”

“Who?”

“The policeman.”

“Khosov?”

“If that’s his name.”

“Why?”

“Why. To create an incident, to make politics, to give their newspapers something to say: bloody-fanged Bolshevik murders local policeman. Yes?”

Khristo thought about it for a time. He understood it, but it seemed very strange. Events occurred, newspaper stories were written. That the sequence could be staged-events made to happen so that stories would be written-had simply never crossed his mind.