Alan Furst - Blood of Victory

“Can you meet me outside? Right away?”

“Who is this?”

“Kubalsky. Very urgent, Ilya.”

“All right.”

“See you in one minute.”

It was cold outside. Serebin shivered in his jacket and tried to stay dry by standing next to the wall of the tannery. The smell of the place was heavy in the wet air, the smell of a century of hides and carcasses and offal. Growing impatient, he looked at his watch. Politics. Why in God’s name… He was staring at the front of the building when the windows blew out. A cloud of dirty smoke, glass and wood and pieces of the IRU office, the sound of it hitting the street lost in the echoes of the explosion which rolled away into silence as the screams began.

There were two Serebins at that moment. One sat down. The other, the real one, ran as far as the foot of the stairs, where he was forced back by the crowd. He saw the girl, she had blood on her and her eyes were vacant, but she was there, stumbling down the stairs between a man and a woman. The woman had one hand pressed over her eyes while the other gripped the shoulder of the girl’s blouse. She was either pulling the girl away from what had happened in the office or holding on to her because she couldn’t see. Or, perhaps, both. To Serebin, it wasn’t clear.

He waited, it seemed to take a long time, people were coughing, their faces stained with black soot. Eventually, the stairway cleared and Serebin climbed up to the office. The air was thick with smoke and dust-it was dark as night and hard to breathe-but the building wasn’t on fire. He didn’t think it was. There were three or four people walking around in what had been the office, one of them knelt by a shape beneath a table. Serebin stepped on a shoe, heard a siren in the distance. Goldbark always wore a silver tie, and so did what he saw on the floor by a cast-iron radiator, now bent in a vee aimed at the ceiling.

“She’s alive, I think.” A voice in the darkness.

“Don’t move her.”

“What did she say?”

“I couldn’t hear.”

He went up to Besiktas, to the yellow house on the Bosphorus. Tamara wore a heavy coat and a sweater, and, knotted under her chin, one of those head scarves that all Ukrainian women had, red roses on a black background. She’d bundled up so they could sit on the terrace, where the wind made the lantern flicker on the garden table, because she knew he was one of those people who don’t like to be indoors.

“It’s too cold for you,” he said.

“No. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m going in.”

“Go ahead. I’ll be right here.”

Stubborn. Like all of them. The word Ukraine meant borderland.

One of the sisters appeared with a pot of steaming tea-Tamara had asked for that because she thought it might settle him-and a bottle of vodka, which would.

When he told her the story she was silent for a long time, then shook her head slowly. She’d seen such things, been told such things, too often. Finally she said, “Was it Russians, Ilya? Special services?”

“Maybe.”

“Why would they do this?”

He shrugged. “Espionage, of some sort, maybe somebody running a network out of the IRU office. It’s a convenient setting, if you think about it. And nothing new-every spy service in the world tries to recruit emigres, and every counterintelligence office tries to stop it. So, what happens next, is the local people see something they don’t like, and then…”

“But they spared you.”

Serebin nodded.

“That didn’t just, happen.”

“No.”

She poured two cups of tea, took one for herself, held the vodka bottle over the other. “You want?”

“A little.”

He moved his chair back from the table and lit a cigarette.

“You have family in it, no?”

“My mother’s sister.” She had never been an aunt.

Tamara thought it over for a moment, then said, “Ah, the Mikhelson girls.” She smiled-it was strange to remember a time when the world just went along, one day to the next.

A well-known story in Odessa, the life and courtship of the Mikhelson girls. Frieda and Malya. Zaftig, smart, they smoked cigarettes, wore black, read French novels, went to Polish spas. Frieda got Serebin’s father, a son of the nobility-the real thing: handsome, brilliant, certainly a little crazy but who cared. So, now Frieda had a husband, Malya had to have one too, but it didn’t last a year. She wore him out, going off to screw her lovers whenever the mood took her. A dancer, a baron, a colonel. The husband shot himself in the front parlor and they couldn’t find the cat for days. And it was Serebin’s grandfather who wept, poor soul. He’d worked his heart out, selling agricultural machinery, for his darling girls, who gave him nothing but grief. In 1917, Malya joined her friends in the Cheka-the most stylish job in town that winter. “God forgive me,” Serebin’s grandfather whispered to him just before he died, “I should’ve gone to America with everybody else.”

Serebin walked to the edge of the terrace and stared out at the lights on the Asian shore of the city. A ferry, then a train across the Anatolian steppe to Persia — he knew what was waiting for him in the lobby of his hotel. When he returned to the table Tamara said, “Hard to believe that your aunt is still alive, after the purges. Most of them disappeared.”

“They did, but she climbed.”

“Took part in it, probably.”

“Probably.”

“ Had to.”

“I would think.”

The sea mist was clouding Serebin’s glasses. He took them off, pulled a handful of shirt out of his belt, and began to clean the lenses. “Of course, all that who and why business is a bubbemeisah.” A story made up for children. “Nobody knows what happened except the people who did it, and if they’re a halfway professional organization, nobody ever will.” He finished his tea, and poured some vodka into the cup.

“Before you go, Ilya, I want you to see something.”

The interior of the house had grown in complicated ways over time. Tamara led him to the back, then opened a door to reveal a stairway so narrow he had to turn his shoulders as he climbed. At the top, another door, and a room beneath the eaves, the ceiling slanting sharply down to a single, small window. A secret room. At first, Serebin thought he’d never seen it before, then realized it had been worked on. The piles of dusty shutters with broken slats were gone, replaced by a cot covered with a blanket. A battered table and chair had been set below the window, and every board, ceiling, walls, and floor, had been freshly whitewashed. All it lacked, he thought, was the tablet of writing paper and sharpened pencils on the table.

“Of course you understand,” she said.

“Yes. Thank you.” It had gotten to him.

“Perhaps it’s not to be, right away, but who knows, Ilya, the day may come.”

He couldn’t really answer her. That somebody should want to do this for him, that in itself was refuge. And what more, in this life, could anyone offer?

He started to speak, but she pounded him gently on the shoulder with the side of her fist. Oh shut up.

When Serebin was fourteen, he would swim with his friends off a jetty north of the Odessa docks. The whole crowd, naked and skinny, from the Nicholas I Commercial School of Odessa. Joined, one sweltering August afternoon, by Tamara Petrovna and her friend Rivka. Fearless, they stripped down and dove in and swam way out. Later, lazing on the rocks, Tamara caught Serebin staring at her backside. She picked up a clamshell and heaved it at him-a lucky shot on the nose-Serebin’s eyes ran tears and he got red in the face. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” he shouted, hand pressed to his nose. “I’m not even wearing my glasses.”