Alan Furst: Blood of Victory

The captain, young and rather smart looking, with a carefully clipped mustache, returned the telephone receiver to its cradle. He didn’t slam it down, exactly, but used enough force to produce a single note from the bell.

Zolti, in Hungarian, asked the official a question.

The answer was brief.

“What is it?” Serebin said.

“The army’s checking things, tonight,” Zolti said.

The captain presented himself to Serebin with a military half bow. He carried a large flashlight, and gestured toward the dock. “Shall we go and take a look?” he said, in good French, then followed Serebin out the door.

Zolti undid the sailor’s knot at one corner of the tarpaulin and raised it to reveal the iron wall of the turbine. The thing looked terrible, blistered paint, a savage dent, a large patch of rust shaped like a map of South America. The captain put a finger on it and a large flake fell off.

“We have to buy used,” Serebin said.

“Very old, isn’t it?”

“Nothing our machinists can’t fix.”

The captain paused, but decided not to comment. The three of them walked around the turbine, then, using the dock, moved to the second barge, which held the industrial monster late of the Esztergom Power Authority. Loaded at a dock in Budapest, it appeared to have been torn loose from its concrete base. The captain squatted and ran his flashlight underneath, looking for machine guns or Jews or whatever interested them in Bazias that night. Then he stood up and, when he moved back to let Zolti replace the tarpaulin, his heel landed on the hatch cover, which rocked beneath his weight. He looked down to see what it was, then stepped nimbly aside, as though he were afraid he’d damaged something. “So now, the next,” he said.

He was quite thorough, Serebin thought. Even went up into the pilot cabin and had a look around. When he was done, the three of them returned to the customs post, where the official at the desk stamped their papers.

“Tell me, Joszi,” Erma said, “what’s the army doing up here?”

The official didn’t answer with words, but his face wasn’t hard to read. Endless bullshit. “When you coming back, love?”

Erma thought it over. “A week, maybe, if we can get a cargo in Giurgiu.”

“If?” The official laughed as he handed Serebin his passport. “See you in a week,” he said. Across the room, the captain stood brooding over the telephone, tapping away.

With Zolti at the helm, they moved cautiously down the canal and out onto the river. “How far now?” Serebin asked.

“Maybe forty kilometers,” Erma said. “So, figure something under three hours. The Yugoslavs have a border post at Veliko Gradiste, about an hour from here, but we may not have to stop, we’ll see. Basically, if you’re leaving the country, the Serbs are glad to see you go.”

“Do we stop for a pilot?”

“Normally, we don’t.”

“Good.” Serebin was relieved. “Better not to deal with somebody like that if we don’t have to.”

“We do what we want,” Zolti said. “Pretty much they leave us alone-we’ve been at it for a long time.”

After that, it grew quiet in the cabin. The hills were tight to the shore now and the current ran fast and heavy under the keel, taking them downstream. When the boat swung around a broad shoal at midriver they could hear the rush of the water, churned to white foam by the gravel beneath it. 9:20. Not long now. They saw a single Roumanian tugboat, without a tow, working its way up to Bazias, a high wave riding the bow. “Strong, tonight,” Zolti said, resettling his hands on the wheel, then glancing over his shoulder at the barges.

“…in the arms of Danubio,” Erma said. Her voice suggested the words of a song, recited by somebody who can’t sing.

“Who’s that?”

“The river god.”

An amusing idea-in daylight, on dry land. But this thing, this energy, beneath him deserved a god about as much as anything he’d ever experienced.

9:44. Kilometer 1050.

It was Erma who saw the searchlight.

Behind them somewhere, she said. Only a flicker, then it was gone-just in time for Serebin and Zolti to spin around and search the river astern and ask her if she was really sure about this. Because, when they looked, they couldn’t see it. But there were rock walls for riverbanks now and a slight shift of direction would be enough to conceal anything.

Zolti looked once more, then again. “Can’t be,” he said.

But it was.

And in a little while they could all see it. A strong white beam, growing slowly brighter as it caught up to them.

“How deep is it here?” Serebin asked.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Very deep.”

“Too deep?”

Zolti only now understood what he was getting at. “Do you want to see the chart?”

No, he didn’t need to see anything-these people knew the river. Don’t panic, he told himself. It might be nothing.

It was not, however, nothing. It was, fifteen minutes later, a steel-hulled launch with 177 painted on the bow, a Roumanian flag flying above the stern, and a pair of heavy machine guns, fitted with a curved shield, mounted just forward of the deckhouse. And, in addition, a siren, which wound up and down for a time, to be replaced by an officer with a loud-hailer-the amplified voice of authority intensified as it echoed between the cliffs above the river.

“Empress of Szeged,” it said.

That much Roumanian Serebin could understand, but for what came next he had to ask for translation.

“They’re telling us to pull into the pilot station at Moldova Veche,” Erma said.

“Not for a pilot.”

“No.”

The patrol boat took up station off their stern quarter, which provided a clear field of fire through the gap, some thirty feet, between the tug and the first barge. Zolti pulled a cord fixed to the ceiling above his head, producing two bleats of the boat horn. “That means we’ll do what they want,” he said.

Using the side of her fist, Erma smacked the wooden skirting that ran below the wheel and a panel fell open, revealing a string bag nailed to its back. In the bag, a huge Mannlicher, the Mauser-style pistol of the Austro-Hungarian Empire-long barrel, ammunition magazine a box by the trigger guard-which gave off an oily shine in the glare of the searchlight. “Just so you know,” she said to Serebin, pushing the panel back in place.

“What if,” Serebin said, “we went aground. On the Yugoslav side of the river.”

“Aground?” Zolti said. Serebin saw what he meant-off the starboard bow, a granite wall rose from the water.

“And it wouldn’t stop them,” Erma said.

Not much to say, after that. They chugged on through the night toward the pilot station. Inside Serebin, a mixture of rage and sorrow. All that work. And a memory of the river pilot, his red satin smoking jacket and his Marseilles apartment. Betrayed, he’d said. You have to remember where you are. “I’m sorry,” Serebin said quietly.

Erma said “Ach.” In a way that forgave him and damned the world for what it was and, in case he didn’t understand all that, she dropped a rough hand on his shoulder.

The pilot station at Moldova Veche was set up like the customs post-a canal dug out of the bank beside the river, a dock, and a sagging one-story shack with a shed roof. Tied up at the far end of the canal were three or four small motor launches, clearly meant to ferry officials back and forth on the river. On the land side of the shack, a dirt path climbed a wooded hill, probably to the Szechenyi road.

There was a welcoming committee waiting for them on the dock: two Roumanian gendarmes, rural police, both with sidearms. Erma threw a line to one of them, and he secured the tug to an iron post. The barges drifted up behind the Empress and banged into the old tires lashed to the stern-even in the canal, the current on this part of the river was strong. The patrol boat docked behind the last barge, its engine running in neutral, thin smoke, heavy with the smell of gasoline, rising from its exhaust vents.