Night Soldiers

Brasserie Heininger. Tell him Vladi Z. sent you and give him my greatest respects. And if, perchance, you are some provocateur chekist piece of filth, then we, we, you understand, will have you in the ground by sundown.” On the train north, Khristo’s heart had pounded with excitement. Watching the winter countryside roll past, he touched the Nansen passport in his pocket a hundred times and hoped and dreamed more than he’d ever dared. Paris. Paris.

The song ended; the dancers broke apart and applauded themselves. Toledo Red shifted the cigar stub to the other corner of his mouth and banged out the introduction to “The Sheik of Araby.” There were squeals of anticipation from the dance floor as the saxophone player, a great fat fellow with a gold-toothed grin, draped one of the Beales’ monogrammed damask napkins over his head in a make-believe burnoose. Winnie Beale had reappeared, after her dramatic entrance, dressed in emerald crepe de chine and now began dancing her own version of the desert slave girl-Valentino’s beloved in a Balenciaga gown.

She gave Khristo an affectionate leer as she swept past him. Strange, he thought, these people of the night who glittered in the world of Heininger and the Beale mansion. Mood-swept, arrogant, insecure, yet at times unbelievably kind. They were the gods and goddesses of this city, from the smoke-filled jazz dens on the Rive Gauche to the chauffeured caravans that moved through the Bois de Boulogne at dawn. Yet they took a curious, backhanded pride in knowing a simple waiter. He had become, of all things, a minor feature of this world. Nick.

Stranger still, he cared for them. He was younger than most, yet they played at being his children. “Nick, my button has torn loose!” “Be a good fellow, Nick, and help Madame with her lobster.” And even, “Oh Nick, I feel so blue.” They had, it seemed to him, bad dreams-bad dreams they did not understand. Premonitions. And they sensed, somehow, that he did understand. That he knew what was coming. And that, when it came, he would remember their affection for him, that he would protect them. They would never admit that they were the Jews of Berlin, the aristocracy of Russia, the wealthy Spaniards trapped in Madrid and forced to flee to the Finnish embassy, yet, deep down, they sensed that the world as they’d known it had only a little more time to run.

“Dear boy?”

Again caught in reverie, he was startled, and looked directly at the man standing before him. He was on the short side and quite handsome, with thick, reddish-brown hair swept across a noble forehead. His eyes at first seemed exhausted-dark and shadowed-then Khristo realized that makeup had been used to create the illusion.

Looking down quickly, Khristo reached for the salmon server.

“Not necessary, dear boy, I’ve had me supper.” He handed over a business card.

“Give us a call, will you sometime? I’m a photographer, in a sort of way. Like to take your portrait.”

Then he was gone.

A fine, dry snow was falling on Paris as he walked home from the party. It dusted the cobblestones pale and sugary and hardened the yellow beams of the streetlamps into severe triangles-like a painted backdrop, he thought, for a street scene in a nightclub act. He watched a boulevard turn silver before his eyes, and some trick of the light made the spires of the churches seem disconnected, floating free in the windless night air. All for his hungry eyes, he thought, all this. He had only to open his heart a little and the city breathed itself into him, sent him climbing in a perfect, pointless, nighttime elation to a height that no sorrow could reach. A pair of policemen, rubber capes black and shining, rode past on their bicycles. A window of the Hotel St. Cyr squeaked open and a young man in gartered shirtsleeves stared up at the sky. Framed in the oval window of a taxi, idling at a corner of the Rue de Rennes, a man and a woman kissed lightly-lips barely in contact-then moved apart and touched each other’s faces with the tips of their fingers. At the all-night cafe on the Rue des Ecoles he saw a group of well-rouged old ladies, bundled into the collars of their Persian lamb coats, gathered at a table near the bar. Each one had a tiny dog on her lap or in the crook of her arm. From the way the women leaned across the table, they seemed like conspirators in a plot. It was, after all, well past three in the morning. What brought them together like this? The Affair of the Little Dogs, he thought. The oddest conspiracy of 1937, a year of conspiracies.

But nothing here was what it seemed. Even the gray stone of the buildings hid within itself a score of secret tints, to be revealed only by one momentary strand of light. At first, the tide of secrecy that rippled through the streets had made him tense and watchful, but in time he realized that in a city of clandestine passions, everyone was a spy. Amours. Fleeting or eternally renewed, tender or cruel, a single sip or an endless bacchanal, they were the true life and business of a place where money was never enough and power always drained away. And, since the first days of his time there, he had had his own secrets.

It was a long walk. From the Rue de Varenne in the Seventh Arrondissement, the heart of Paris fashion, to the rented room on a street of Jewish tailors and little shops that made eyeglass frames, out past the Place Republique, not far from the Pere Lachaise cemetery. It took him about two hours, usually, though he could make it last somewhat longer than that and sometimes did. He was accompanied, for a time, by Marko, the bartender, and his nephew Anton, who washed the crystal and the china service. All three carried parcels wrapped in brown paper and tied with string-though Khristo’s was rather heavier than the others’-the “extras” of the waiter’s profession. The sous chef had done the wrapping in the manner of patisserie clerks, who could fold paper into cones of sufficient strength that an elaborate pastry would survive a child’s trip to the store. Nestled inside the packets were slightly crumbled slices of pate of wild duck in a game jelly, white asparagus spears, and thick cuts of tenderloin beef from the Limousin, carved to the English taste. In addition, Marko kept a bottle below the bar to receive the remnants of the brandy service. The Beales had provided their guests with an Armagnac, a select vintage of 1896, and all three took sustenance from it now and again as they walked.

They judged the party quite successful. Not a single fistfight and only two slaps-reportedly of political, not romantic, origin and therefore hardly worth discussion. The tulip-shaped elevator remained cranky, but no horrified shouts from between-floor guests had had to be attended to. Nobody jumped out a window, or set fire to the drapes, or tried to drink champagne by pouring it over female undergarments and squeezing them out like Spanish wine sacks. It was the Americans who drank from shoes, under the curious impression that romantic Europeans did such things. The chef, according to Anton, who worked in the kitchen, had been at his very best. Whistling and winking, he had performed with casual speed, directing his staff like a lion tamer in good humor. And hardly a curse all night long. This unusual sweetness of temper was attributed by the Beale staff to his near ceaseless screwing of one of Madame’s maids, a recent development. But which one? The shy little redhead from Quimper? Or the fulsome Italian, Tomasina, with haunches that could hurl a man into the air? Speaking of which, what of the naked Beale woman? Would the society columns consider it thrilling or declasse? “I served her champagne,” Marko said, in his sturdy Slavic French, “and her left tit looks toward Prague.”

Together, they walked nearly the length of the Boulevard St. Germain, then Marko and Anton headed for their rooms by the Gare Austerlitz, the railroad terminal, while Khristo used the Pont de Sully to cross the river. Tomorrow night, he thought, he would take the Pont Marie. Well-learned instincts forbade the use of the same route night after night. One varied daily habits at every opportunity, one made prediction of time and place as difficult as possible, one did not, after all, shed Arbat Street quite so easily. His journey took him through the Marais, the Jewish quarter, a good place to quicken the footsteps. As the situation for Jews in Europe grew darker, the streets of the Marais seemed to him more and more like a maze, a trap. At the northern border of the district he paused to warm up by the exhaust vents of a baker-who had fired his pine bough ovens an hour earlier-then headed for home.

A battered little Simca crawled up the Rue du Chemin Vert behind him, rather too slowly for his taste, and he stepped into a doorway and let it go past-eventually viewing the absurdly besotted driver with some amusement. But one had to be alert. Do not forget everything, was the way he put it to himself. And he had not. He read the Russian emigre papers, like thousands of others, with a hopeful heart. To the east, the NKVD-in fact the entire Soviet apparat-was stinging itself to death like a tormented scorpion as Yezhov, the redheaded dwarf, rolled down purge upon purge. Good! Let them rip each other to pieces, he thought. Let them sink into the swamp of bureaucratic confusion until not a single file remained in place. The simple defection of a junior intelligence officer would drift endlessly down their lists to the bottom of a clerical sea. Or so he hoped-though in fact he knew them much better than that. He had changed the parting of his hair, grown a thick mustache (all the brasserie waiters in Paris had to be well furred in some fashion; it emphasized the sense of midnight deviltry the proprietors wished to encourage), and, with remorse, destroyed the clothing he’d worn in Spain. Now he had an old sheepskin jacket, bought at a marche aux puces on the outskirts of the city. Beyond that, there was fatalism. Refugees from Eastern Europe and Germany now came to