David Benioff - City of Thieves

“I have a knife, too,” she said, slipping a birch-handled dagger out of a sheath tucked into her belt and offering it to me hilt first.

I turned the slender blade in my hand. There was a pattern of fine lines on the steel, like ripples in disturbed water.

“It seems a little flimsy.”

“It’s not.” She leaned forward to run the tip of her index finger along the textured blade. “That’s Damascus steel.”

She was close enough now that I could study the curling ridges of her ear or the creases that interrupted the smooth span of her forehead when she raised her eyebrows. A few stray pine needles were lodged in the thickets of her hair and I resisted the impulse to pluck them out.

“It’s called a puukko,” she told me. “All the Finnish boys get them when they come of age.”

She took the knife back from me and tilted it so she could admire the play of firelight on metal.

“The best sniper in the world is a Finn. Simo Häyhä. The White Death. Five hundred and five confirmed kills in the Winter War.”

“So you took that off some Finn you shot?”

“Bought it for eighty rubles in Terijoki.” She slipped the dagger back into the sheath on her belt and surveyed the room, looking for something more interesting to occupy her attention.

“Maybe you can be the Red Death,” I said, trying to keep talking because I knew if I stopped, I would never regain the courage to start again. “That was some fine sniping out there. I guess the Einsatzkommandos aren’t used to people shooting back at them.”

Vika regarded me with her cold blue eyes. There was something not entirely human about her gaze, something predatory, lupine. She made a circle of her lips before shaking her head.

“Why do you think those were Einsatzkommandos?”

“The girls told us that’s who comes here.”

“What are you, fifteen? You’re not a soldier—”

“Seventeen.”

“—but you’re traveling with a soldier who’s not with his unit.”

“Well, as he was saying, we have special orders from Colonel Grechko.”

“Special orders to do what? Organize the partisans? Do I look so very stupid to you?”

“No.”

“You came here to visit the girls? Is that it? One of these is your girlfriend?”

I was strangely proud that she thought one of the lovely girls in the house might be my girlfriend, even though I could hear the insulting tone in her phrasing, “one of these.” She was curious about me, that was a start. And she was right to be curious. Why should a Piter boy be all the way out here, twenty kilometers behind enemy lines, resting in a comfort house maintained for officers of the invaders?

I remembered what Kolya had told me about enticing a woman with mystery.

“We have our orders, I’m sure you have yours, let’s keep it at that.”

Vika stared at me in silence for a few seconds. She might have been enticed, but it was hard to tell.

“Those Germans out there with their brains in the snow? That’s regular Army. You’d think a man—sorry, a boy —working with the NKVD would know the difference.”

“I didn’t get a chance to inspect their insignia because you people were pointing your rifles at us.”

“We’re looking for Einsatz, though. That’s big game. We’ve been hunting this corpse-fucker Abendroth the last six weeks. Thought he might be here tonight.”

I had never heard the curse “corpse-fucker” before. The phrase sounded brutally vulgar coming from her lips. I smiled for some reason, a smile that must have seemed odd and unprovoked. In my mind I pictured her with her pants off; the image was sharp and detailed, far more convincing than my imagined nudes usually were. Maybe Kolya’s pornographic playing cards really had helped.

“Abendroth’s in a house in Novoye Koshkino,” I told her. “By the lake.”

The information seemed to entice her more than anything else I had said. My inappropriate smile matched with my knowledge of the Nazi’s whereabouts made me momentarily intriguing.

“Who told you that?”

A more mysterious man would have known how to deflect the question, how to sidestep like a boxer, bobbing and weaving, never getting tagged. I knew something she wanted to know. For the first time I had a slight advantage over her. The words Novoye Koshkino gave my NKVD credentials a touch of credence, offered me some leverage I could exploit.

“Lara,” I said, giving it all away with a word.

“Which one is Lara?”

I pointed her out. As Vika’s unblinking gaze shifted, I felt that I had somehow betrayed Lara. She had been generous—given us shelter from the cold, fed us warm food, ventured into the brutal winter night in her bare feet to help defend us from the suspicious partisans—and I had surrendered her name to this smirking blue-eyed killer. Vika slid her feet off the sofa, her toes in their wool socks grazing against my pants leg. She stood and walked over to Lara, who was crouched by the fire, adding another log to the blaze. With her boots off I saw how small Vika really was, but she moved with the kind of lazy grace you see in athletes when they’re relaxing away from the playing field. This is modern warfare, I thought, where muscle means nothing and a slender girl can halve a German’s head at four hundred meters.

Lara seemed nervous when she saw the sniper smiling down at her. She rubbed the soot off her hands as she listened to Vika. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I saw Lara nod, and from the way she gestured with her hands I figured she was giving Vika directions.

Kolya walked into the room with Korsakov. Each had a glass of vodka in hand and they were laughing at some joke, best of chums now, the earlier hostility forgotten. I had expected nothing less— Kolya was a great salesman, especially when he was selling himself. He ambled over to the horsehair sofa and sat down with a sigh, slapping my knee and downing the last of his vodka.

“You get enough to eat?” he asked me. “We’re ready to move.”

“We’re leaving? I thought we’d sleep here tonight.”

The gunfight had riled my system, but now that some time had passed since the bullets were flying, I felt the fatigue seeping back into my bones. We had walked all day through the snow and I hadn’t slept since Sonya’s apartment.

“Come on, you’re smarter than that. What do you think is going to happen when those Fritzes out there don’t come back from their little party tonight? How long before they send a platoon to find out where their Oberleutnants disappeared to?”

Vika had gotten what she needed from Lara. Now she spoke in low tones to Korsakov, the two of them standing in the corner of the room—the broad-shouldered, stubble-jawed partisan commander and his little assassin, lit by the flickering fire.

The other partisans began to get ready, pulling on their dry socks and their felt boots, swallowing one more glass of vodka for the long march ahead of them. The girls of the house had disappeared to the back rooms where, I guessed, they would grab whatever they could carry and decide where to go next.

“We could take the German cars,” I said, inspired by the idea. “Drop off the girls in Piter…” Like most ideas I considered inspired, the brilliance of it faded before I reached the end of the second sentence.

“Drive a Kübel toward the Leningrad line,” said Kolya. “Hm, yes, that’s a thought. And when our own people blow us off the road and some Don Cossack country idiot pulls our smoking bodies from the wreckage, he’ll say, ‘Huh! These German boys look just like us!’ No, little lion, we’re not going back to Piter yet. We’ve got business in Novoye Koshkino.”