Alan Furst - Blood of Victory

Enormous silence. And not a human soul to be seen.

For that much, he was grateful. At one point he stopped to rest, realized that the Mannlicher was getting heavier with every step, opened the magazine to find a single bullet, and threw the gun into the forest below. It did occur to him that an hour of sleep might actually speed him on his way, but he knew better than to do that. Speed you on your way to heaven. So he rose and trudged on, singing quietly to himself as he marched.

All through the hours of the night, he walked. Then, as light touched the eastern sky, he heard a creaking wheel, and the thud of hooves on stone, coming up behind him. He stepped off the road, half-ran, half-slid a little way down the hill, and hid behind a tree until he could see what it was. An oxcart, with high wheels built of thick planks, a man and a woman in the black clothing of Roumanian peasants sitting together on the driver’s seat. Serebin decided to take a chance, and returned to the road.

When the man saw him he pulled on the reins, tipped his battered black hat, the woman beside him moved to make room, and Serebin climbed up next to them. In the cart, a small shape carefully sewn into a sheet. Serebin, in French, offered his sympathies, which, without understanding a word of it, the couple perfectly understood, and the woman thanked him in Roumanian.

This was better than walking, though not all that much faster. The ox plodded steadily along as the gray dawn-farm roosters at it in the distance-turned into a gray morning. The road grew wider as stone turned to dirt, and they passed through a series of mountain villages, sixteenth-century villages-mud, straw, and cow manure. In a narrow valley, a column of mounted soldiers approached from the other direction. Were they searching for fugitives? Serebin didn’t let them get a look at his face, but when the officer at the head of the column saw what was in the cart he removed his hat, and inclined his head toward the couple.

Serebin rode on the oxcart until mid-morning, then they stopped by a path that wound through the fields-to a church, he thought, and a graveyard. Serebin thanked them, and continued on foot.

But not for long. When he saw, in the distance, a pair of bicycle riders, he rushed into the woods, tripped on a root and went sprawling. Then cursed himself for fleeing from phantoms-at the potential cost of a sprained ankle-until he saw that the young men on the bicycles wore the uniform of the national gendarmerie and had rifles slung on their backs. He waited until they passed, returned to the road, but was forced to hide three times in the next hour; first by a big sedan, then by a truck, and last by a band of singing German hikers. That did it. He found a cattle path and followed it to a village where he managed, by greeting an old woman over a stake fence, to buy an apple and a loaf of bread. Then decided not to test his luck any further and found himself a hideout in a willow grove, where he ate the apple and the bread, drank from a brook-the water so cold it made his teeth ache-and settled in to wait for dusk.

He woke suddenly, an hour later, had no idea where he was, returned to consciousness, and still didn’t know where he was. He spent the rest of the day in the willow grove, sometimes dozing, sometimes watching the river, and was back on the road after sunset, now glad of the darkness and the gathering fog. The next village he came to was bigger than the others. It had a street-paved with quarried stone a long, long time ago, and a church-a cross mounted on the dome of an old Turkish mosque.

A small cafe was packed with men in dark suits, Serebin waited for one of them to leave, then tried to ask him the name of the village. It took some effort by both of them, but eventually the man saw the light and cried out, “Ah, Berzasca. Berzasca!” Serebin kept walking. A few minutes later, he found the river, and an arched bridge built of stone block. Not the bridge he was looking for but, at least, the right river.

There was no path to the logging road-Serebin was supposed to have been on the Empress, having unloaded his cargo at the Stenka ridge-so he had to walk beside the river, forcing his way through the high reeds of a flooded marsh, with water above his knees. This took a long time, but he kept at it, and eventually saw a rickety bridge, moss-covered boards nailed across two logs. At the end of the bridge he found a pair of ruts that wound through the trees-probably the logging road and not the worst one he’d ever seen. But no sign of a car, and no sign of Marrano.

Serebin sat on the edge of the bridge and thought about what to do next. Fishing boat down to Constanta? Oxcart, or car, up to Hungary? Try to cross the river? Well, that was a problem. Because one thing they didn’t have in this part of the world was bridges. Not where the river formed a border between nations, they didn’t, and that was the Danube’s fate once it left the plains of Hungary. Not that they hadn’t built bridges, they had, at optimistic moments over the centuries, but then somebody always burned them, so why bother. And, in fact, for pretty much all the recorded history in this part of the world, most of the bridges had been built by conquerors-Romans after Dacian gold, Ottoman Turks, Austrian engineers-and had thereby earned themselves a bad reputation.

So then? He didn’t know. He was tired, and sore, and cold, and that, just then, was all he knew. God, send me a packet of dry Sobranies and a box of matches. Something made him look up and there, at the other end of the bridge, a figure stood in the shadows at the edge of the forest. A sylvan deity, perhaps, but not the common sort-its hands hung casually at its sides, one of them holding a revolver, the other a briefcase. “I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” Marrano said.

They had to follow the river back to Berzasca-the only other choice was to walk a long way east, where the logging road met the main road. Serebin told his story, Marrano listened thoughtfully, and now and then asked questions, most of which couldn’t be answered. “Certainly,” Serebin said, “they knew we were coming.”

Marrano sighed. “Well, at least we did something. Any idea what happened to the people on the tugboat?”

“They ran, with everyone else, when the first mine went off. They could’ve gone north, into Hungary, or maybe they stole a boat, somewhere downriver. With any luck at all, they got away.”

Pushing the tall reeds aside, they plodded on through the marsh until they reached the village street. “Where’s the car?” Serebin said.

“In an alley. I waited overnight, but when you didn’t show up, I thought I’d better hide it.”

“So,” Serebin said, “that’s that. Now it’s up to the Serbs.”

Marrano stopped for a moment, unbuckled his briefcase, and took out a newspaper. A Roumanian newspaper, from a nearby town, but the headline was easy enough to read, even in the darkness, because the print was quite large. COUP D’ETAT IN YUGOSLAVIA, it said.

“Who?”

“Us.”

“Will it last?”

“Not for long, the Fuehrer’s chewing his carpet.”

“Too bad. What happened?”

“British agents kidnapped Stoyadinovich, Hitler’s man in Belgrade. But then, forty-eight hours later, the government caved in anyhow and signed with the Axis. So, yesterday morning, the coup.”

“Back and forth.”

“Yes.”

“Was it the army?”

“Led by air force officers. Nominally, the country is now run by a seventeen-year-old king.”

They turned down a long alley. In a courtyard at the end, two boys were sitting on the hood of an Aprilia sedan, sharing a cigarette. Marrano spoke to them in Roumanian and gave them some money, clearly more than they expected. One of them asked a question, Marrano smiled and answered briefly.