Alan Furst - Night Soldiers

The objectives of the FELDSPAR mission were not complicated: he was to collect and transmit data on bombing effectiveness and war factory production in Bohemia, the region of Prague, and prepare for the reception of additional agents. The J-E radio would work very nicely from a roof, and the Mosquito would be circling 35,000 feet above him at certain prearranged hours of the night, unseen by German antiaircraft crews. There had been no arrangement made for exfiltration; General Patton’s Third Army was headed that way at a good clip and they would come to him. If he got into trouble, the Czech underground could move him to the protection of units fighting in the Tatra Mountains to the south.

Hundreds of man-hours had clearly been spent on this mission and, to the extent possible, the nature of the operation shielded him from excessive peril. That gave him a certain confidence, reinforced by his NKVD schooling and experience, which trained one to rely on guile and ruthlessness because there was no J-E radio and not enough aviation gasoline for an airplane to fly in circles over the communicating agent.

Concentrate , the briefers told him. Know where you are and whom you are with every second of every day, and if you experience fatigue, treat it as you would a dangerous sickness. Keep incriminating evidence as far away from you as possible-hide everything . When you are out in the streets of Prague, you must be a Yugoslavian conscript worker. They used chemicals to remove the nicotine stain from his index finger because cigarettes were sufficiently scarce in Occupied Europe that the yellowish discoloration was now rarely seen. The Czechs you’ll be working with, they told him, are very good , espionage has been a high art in Central Europe for hundreds of years. FELDSPAR certainly was, he thought, a mission guaranteed for success as much as any operation of that type could ever be.

Perhaps his nerve slipped.

He accused himself of that more than once, as January became February and Prague lay under a blanket of dirty ice in the coldest winter in Europe for forty years. He’d left the teacher’s house after three days. He had no objective reason to do so-it was simply that the neighborhood felt wrong. He moved to a burned-out warehouse on the eastern edge of the industrial district, a place where barrels of cooking oil had been stored. The building stood three stories high, scorch patterns flared out on the plaster walls above and below the broken windows, and when the rains came in early March, oil that had leached into the cinder loading yard over the years returned to the surface and the smell of it, singed and rancid, hung in the wet air. He lived in what had once been the warehouse office, where a small stove still functioned, bought black market coal at an exorbitant price and lugged it back to his hideout in a metal bucket. And, anytime he went anywhere, he carried a small snub-nosed VZ/27 he’d picked up from his coal supplier. That was something no Yugoslav conscript worker would dare to have, but he had no intention of being taken alive here, not by these Occupation troops, not by this Gestapo. It was a cheap, shoddy weapon, a 7.65 automatic with a miserly eight-round magazine and a plastic grip, produced under Occupation, with Bohmische Waffenfabrik Prag replacing the usual Czech manufacturer’s mark. This pistol was made in German Bohemia -the inscription implied- there is no such thing as Czechoslovakia .

But there was. The Czechs had insisted on that.

And the well-dressed people in Bern and Bari who had paid for the lunches hadn’t told him about Prague. Oh, they’d told him, in so many words, in rather cool, unemotional language, what the situation was, describing the political climate, analyzing the cultural and economic conditions, characterizing weather, food, religion, local customs-all the empirical data you could want.

But Prague, in the winter and early spring of 1945, would have required a chorus of the damned to do it true justice. Khristo, when he was out among the people, believed he could actually feel it, like a sickness, a cold, gestating rage that swelled toward the moment of its birth. And the harder the Germans bore down, the more they whipped and tortured and executed, the more it grew. “The day will come,” one of his agents had told him, “when we will hang them up by the feet and soak them with gasoline and set them alight. Upside down, you see, so that they do not die too quickly from breathing the smoke. You will be here,” the man said. “You will see it.”

Khristo believed him. It was not a fantasy of the oppressed, it was a plan, a lucid, thought-out ritual of justice, and the day of its reality was not far off. In the Staromestske Square, in the old part of the city, there was a medieval clock high on the facade of the town hall. When the hour struck, a painted Christ and twelve apostles would appear one by one in a little window below the clock, followed by the figure of hooded Death, whose bell sounded for the passing of time, then the Turk, the Miser, the Vain Fool, and, at last, the Cock. The Germans found it fascinating-Bohemian folklore displayed for their pleasure-and they would gather below the clock when it struck the hour and point and smile and take photographs. They seemed able to ignore the faces of the Czechs who surrounded them: taut, watchful faces, pale amid the dark clothing that everyone seemed to wear, pale in the perpetual dusk of cloudy days and coal smoke that hung above the city.

His principal contact with the Czech underground was named Hlava, a stolid, heavy man who wore eyeglasses with clear plastic frames, a man whose hoarse, measured breathing seemed, to Khristo, a kind of audible melancholia. They sat one seat apart in movie theaters, bumped shoulders in the street as they made brush passes-a scrap of paper moving invisibly from one to the other-urinated side by side in metal troughs in railway stations, shook hands like old friends in shopping streets just after dark. In one week in February they saw the same German newsreel three times: Hermann Goring, having just shot a bison in his private game preserve, distributed the meat to refugees on the road as they streamed in from Soviet-conquered territories in East Prussia.

Hlava was employed as chief bookkeeper in a factory that repaired shot-up Messerschmitt fighter planes. Now and then they were able to meet in a situation where actual conversation was possible, and Hlava revealed himself to be a man who told a certain kind of joke. “Three Czechs-a Bohemian, a Slovakian, and a Moravian-meet in heaven. The first one says …” He never laughed at the jokes, simply gazed at Khristo, awaiting a reaction, his breath rasping in and out in a slow, methodical tempo.

There were, at any given time, about a dozen other agents. Khristo spent his days bicycling around the city, hard-pressed to make his treffs -as the Russians called clandestine meetings. There was a violin teacher whose pupils were mostly the children of German officers, and she had a way with papers-letters, reports-left lying atop desks in studies. There was a police detective, apparently enough trusted by the Germans to see marginal intelligence distributions. Four or five factory workers, a factory physician, a clerk in the electric utility who fed him data on the daily rise and fall of power usage in certain industrial facilities critical to the German war effort.

But then, on March 20, he was offered information of a very different sort. It reached him in bed, amid a jumble of sweaty blankets in a hotel room that rented by the hour, reached him as he smoked a cigarette and stared at the waterstained ceiling above him, numb and mindless for the moment, in a blank daze that passed for tranquillity.