Night Soldiers

sauce diplomat-as though to banish some godlike impurity-then, from the left, drizzled a thin river to the salmon slice, paused to anoint the top with a decorative pool, as in a garden, then ran the river to a perfect delta on the other side of the plate, stopping just short of the thick gold banding. With a tiny silver trident, he fashioned a triangle of capers on the dryland north of the river, then, the denouement, placed two black truffle “rocks” at the edge of the garden pool. White-gloved hand turned beneath the plate so that the intrusive thumb barely rode the edge, he proffered the masterwork, eyes down, speaking the words “Merci, madame” in a soft undertone.

That afternoon, carrying silver trays of hors d’oeuvres covered with brown paper upstairs to the kitchen that served the ballroom, he had observed the Beales’ chef preparing the sauce diplomat. Fish stock, cream-too thick to pour, it had to be spooned from the bottle-lobster butter, brandy and cayenne. Now, in a crystal bowl by his right hand, the sauce’s combined scents drifted up and tormented him. Normally, when he worked at the Brasserie Heininger, he could manage a discreet sample somewhere between kitchen and dining room, but here one was in the public eye.

For a moment, there was no one to serve-a group of rosy-cheeked men favored the roast-and he gazed out into the crowd with the particular dead-eyed, unseeing servant’s stare he’d been taught, suggesting that only the ritual of the salmon could bring him to life. Yet he did see.

A clever play. Written out moment to moment by the guests themselves as they moved about the polished black linoleum in candlelight. Each one, he thought, achieved a sort of glossy sainthood in a special and individual way. Yes, there were trembling hands and bulging eyes and mighty bosoms and shiny pates. No different than Vidin, really. Yet here, by way of some magical process these people had thought up, the common pranks life played upon the body mattered less. The old ladies had big rings and naughty eyes. The fat men were highly polished and told jokes. The chinless girls laughed and shook their little breasts. The wispy young men with wispy mustaches leaned over cleverly and seemed watchful and intelligent. Thank God, he thought, for Omaraeff. Who had brought him to such spectacles.

He served a plumpish, fair-haired man who seemed lost and friendless and on his way to being very drunk in a very depressing way. Then a tall dowager with heavily rouged cheeks who glared down at him with apparent anger. That he would dare to serve her? Perhaps. These were, for the most part, English people, a tribe that swathed its rituals in mystery and seemed perpetually annoyed at the world, offended, perhaps, at humanity’s never-ending attempts to discover what they wanted.

He did not care. He had only salmon to offer, and sauce diplomat. The American woman, Winnie Beale, floated through the room, principally nude and entirely without shame. Clothed only in social position. Which, curiously, sufficed. He had served her table at Heininger several nights in a row-during the opera season, late suppers at Heininger were virtually compulsory-and Omaraeff had informed him that he was now to work at private parties in the Beale mansion on the Rue de Varenne.

Informed him on other subjects as well. Told him, for instance, that Winifred Beale had in fact begun life as Ethel Glebb, daughter of a trolley motorman in a smoky Ohio town on a lake. Worked as a telephone operator. Contrived to meet, and ultimately marry, Dicky Beale of Syracuse, the heir to an immense fortune acquired by his grandfather through the manufacture of stovepipe.

Omaraeff knew everything.

Had thus prepared him for the inevitable grappling match, precisely foreseen and described. The summons to the house. The taxi ride across a rainy Paris afternoon with a tray of langoustines on his lap. The maid’s direction to “bring them upstairs.” The small library that overlooked the Rodin gardens. The flowered cotton shift so accidentally open. The sly look, the giggle, the teasing wordplay of a young girl. The balletic sweep into his arms. The rolling around on the Oriental carpet. “Meet the attack,” Omaraeff had said, “respond to each sortie, but do not advance. Should she wish the cannon rolled out and fired, let her see to it, but do not permit yourself to be provoked. A single sign of passion on your part, dear Khristo, and you will work here no more.” Those instructions he had followed to the letter. She was, up close, frightfully plain. Her face apparently beaten into neutrality over the years, so oiled, patted, painted, baked, kneaded and creamed that it ultimately had neither expression nor feature. It had become a blank canvas, to be turned into whatever she wished. The act was not consummated. She let him up. Kissed him like a fond aunt. He became again the waiter, smoothed his hair, busied himself for a moment with the arrangement of langoustines on the tray, then returned to the restaurant by Metro, pocketing the cab fare.

Some of the guests were dancing. A clickety-clack step to the fast foxtrot produced by the band, four American Negroes who performed most nights at Le Hot Club. The leader, chopping rhythmically at the white piano with thick fingers, was called Toledo Red, his trademark, an unlit stub of cigar, clamped in his teeth as he played. The dancers leaned their upper bodies together, eyes vague, flopping about like unstrung puppets. Khristo watched for a time, seeming to look through them, in fact studying their dance in the smoked-glass mirrors that lined the walls. He noticed that the drapes-black for this occasion, normally violet-had fallen open at one of the tall windows, and he thought he could see snowflakes drifting slowly past the glass. It was the last week in March.

“Hallo there, Nick.”

He snapped to attention. “Madame,” he said, bowing slightly.

“A bit of salmon?”

“Bien sur, madame.”

He took up the silver salmon knife. She was so pale and pretty, this one, like a movie star, a fragile flower in the last decline, dying in the final reel. She was often at his table at Heininger and, as the champagne bottles emptied-“More shampers, Nick!” they would call out-her cheeks blushed red and she became excited and clapped her hands and shrieked with delight at anything anybody said.

“Merci, madame.”

“Thanks ever so much.”

Nick.

At the internment camp near Perpignan, where the French had detained him while the socialist government chased its tail in circles over what was to be done about the Spanish war, Khristo had decided to become a Russian. He was alone at the camp; his three fellow fugitives had fled into the night, having decided that safety lay in ignorance of each other’s intentions. Renata and Faye Berns had been released almost immediately. Andres had been held for a day, then produced a Greek passport from the lining of his jacket and was freed.

But Khristo was officially without documents-the Russian passport with the nom de guerre Markov was nothing but a danger to him and now lay beneath four inches of earth in a Spanish field-so was designated by French officials a Stateless Person. A Russian, he believed, could more easily lose himself in a city like Paris. A Bulgarian would stand out; the Parisian emigre community from that country was not large. But the plan did not work. The League of Nations official who finally processed him, in the last week of 1936, was a Czech, and Khristo dared not try to fool him. Thus he left the camp under his brother’s name, Nikko, and the last name Petrov, common in Bulgaria. The English patrons of the restaurant had shortened Nikko to Nick.

The camp had been a vile place. The internees spent their days shuffling around the barbed-wire perimeter or playing cards-the deck made of torn strips of paper-for cigarettes. They huddled around stoves made of punched- out petrol tins and plotted endlessly in a stew of languages. After more than a month of it, Khristo had thought seriously of escaping. The Senegalese troops who guarded them sometimes did not bring water all day long and the inmates were tortured by thirst, pleading through the wire while the guards stared at them curiously. Sometimes a gate was left open-a clear invitation to escape. If one were caught, however, deportation back to Spain was automatic.

Yet he’d had, in the camp, one great stroke of luck. He’d met a Russian called Vladi Z., a soldier of fortune from an emigre family in Berlin, former harnessmakers to the czar’s St. Petersburg household. Vladi Z. had worked for the Comintern, smuggling guns into Spain through the mountains. He’d taken to putting a bit of money aside for himself, but greed overtook his sense of propriety and he’d been caught at it. Snapped up by the Checa in Barcelona, he had managed to escape, bribing his guards with gold secreted “where the sun never shines.” After some days spent wandering helplessly in the Pyrenees, he had crossed into France at Port-Bou with a group of American journalists. There he claimed German citizenship, but he had shed his passport in fear of the Checa and thus was interned. No matter, he confided to Khristo, his family in Berlin would soon have him out. “You must go to Paris,” he said, “even the devil won’t find you there.” He had assumed, without being told, that Khristo was on the run. “In Paris,” he continued, “one sees Omaraeff. A Bulgarian like yourself. A great man. Headwaiter at the famous