In their midst marched Winnie and Dicky Beale, arm in arm, faces set in pained but hopeful expressions, perfectly in keeping with the emotional atmosphere of the march. They were, Khristo noted, smartly dressed for the occasion. Winnie Beale had on a worker’s peaked cap, properly tilted over one eye, and the squarish, broad-shouldered suit offered by Schiaparelli that was popular for communist events. Elsa Schiaparelli had journeyed to Moscow in 1935 to observe the workers’ styles that would, it was felt, now take precedence in the fashion world. Dicky, careful always not to upstage his furiously
Omaraeff shook his head in patient sorrow. “Lambs,” he said.
A half hour later, they stood across the street from an elegant six-story building on the Place de l’Opera, amid commercial luxury of every sort-marble banks, furriers, jewelers, and
Omaraeff gestured toward the building with his head. “There it is,” he said. “Murderer’s gold.”
“That building?”
“Yes. The top floor is owned by a firm called Floriot et cie. It is a gold repository, for those whose faith in banks did not survive 1929-the Credit Anstalt failure and all of that. In such times it can be very comforting to have some gold locked up in a private vault.”
“I see.”
“What you do not see is that the NKVD sells its gold there.”
Khristo’s response was brusque. He was, for a moment, an intelligence officer once again, and asked the intelligence officer’s eternal question: “How do you know?”
“Friends, Nikko. Friendship is our gold. The newspaper kiosk on the corner is owned by an old man called Leonid, who was a banker in St. Petersburg until 1917. Now he stands in his stall for sixteen hours a day, selling newspapers. And he is forced to watch Russians, coming and going at all hours, with black satchels. It is not so farfetched to say that it is his gold, formerly, that passes before his eyes. A cruel irony, but what can he do? He can come to Djadja Omaraeff, that’s what he can do. And he has done it.”
“And what do you propose?”
“I propose to take it from them.”
“And the pistol?”
“Just in case. One may meet unfriendly persons anywhere, even in the Opera.”
“Who is to plan it?”
“That’s you, Nikko my boy.”
Khristo shook his head. He felt like a man sliding helplessly down a sheer slope toward the cliff that would kill him. “How would I know such things, Djadja? I am only a waiter.”
“Not a bad one, either, I’ve seen to that. What else does one know? Well, you are Bulgarian-but you are not in Bulgaria. Perhaps you do not like the situation there, the way the political wind blows. Yet you do not sit in the lap of the reds, either. You were in Spain, Vladi Z. has told me that, and I doubt you fought for the Falange. You are quiet, in great possession of yourself, everybody’s acquaintance, nobody’s friend. Marko the bartender tells me you take a different bridge across the Seine every night. And, at last, I ask you to get me a pistol-a test of friendship- and you do get it. And not at a pawnshop, either, I’ll wager. What is one to think?”
Khristo was silent.
“Just so,” Omaraeff said, and patted him affectionately on the shoulder.
A cab dropped them off in front of a tiny nightclub called Jardin des Colombes-the Garden of Doves-in a cellar near Montparnasse. One panel of the mirrored wall opened onto a long corridor, full of turnings, that led to a small steam room. They were the only patrons. An old woman took their clothes and gave them towels, turned the steam vent up and shuffled away. They had reached the nightclub in the last hour of the afternoon, as twilight gathered in the side streets, already late for work at the Brasserie.
Omaraeff wiped the sweat from his shaven head and waved concern aside. “You are with me,” he said grandly, “so you need not worry. Marko will get everything under way, and Papa Heininger never shows his face until ten. Relax, my boy, relax. You’ll work plenty in this life. Breathe deeply, take the steam inside yourself, let it cleanse this dirty city from your heart. Ach, Nikko, I was meant to live a country life-a little farm, a little wife, someplace in the mountains, where the birds sing at night.” “Birds don’t sing at night, Djadja.” “On my place they would.”
“Will you permit me to advise you on this matter?” “No! Nikko, no, please. Don’t spoil this lovely steam.” Khristo sighed and lay back on the bench until his head rested comfortably against the wall-the wood was spongy and soft from years of steam. Every man has a destiny, he thought, and this must be mine. Everyone in Vidin believed that life worked in that way. A man might kick and thrash and struggle all he liked-it counted for nothing. The old Turkish saying had it right: so it is written, so it shall be. Even now his mind toyed and played with the building on the Opera. The elevator. The hallways. Time of day. A crush of people. Where a car would go. How many couriers could be taken. If he read Omaraeff properly, the crime was a gesture of politics. Very well, a small act would suffice. Just pray God there was not a river of greed running silently beneath the enterprise. That would make it dangerous. The Russians would not trust their couriers, of course. Their consignments would be small. There would be watchers. They bled the gold wherever in the world they could get their needle in, and there was no point in turning it into roubles. Dollars, pounds sterling, Swiss francs-that’s what they would want. With that, one might actually buy something. There was so much timing to do. Did they wait at the embassy to send the next courier until the last returned? Or was it a telephone signal? Oh why did not some great devil come to the surface of the world and suck them back to hell? Aleksandra! We must fly.
“A little refreshment? Something to drink, perhaps?”
He opened his eyes. “No, thank you.”
“You think too much, Nikko. You’ll wear out your brains if you’re not careful.” Omaraeff stood, adjusted the towel at his waist, walked to the opposite wall and knocked twice, then returned to the bench. “I have arranged a small entertainment,” he said, a slight edge to his voice. “Just something among friends-men of the world. You understand?”
“Ahh,” Omaraeff said lightly, “golden youth.”
One of the boys walked toward Khristo and sat on his knee. “Get off,” he said. The boy did not move for a moment, then stood obediently.
“Dear Nikko, I fear I have insulted you.”
“Of course not. Every man to his pleasure.”
“Yes, yes,” Omaraeff said. He took the other boy by the waist and turned him back and front, like an artist contemplating a sculpture. “Perhaps next time, little one,” he said, dismissing him with a wave.
“We must be paid,” the boy said coldly in guttural French.
“You will be paid,” Omaraeff said. His voice sounded, for a moment, faded, used up. The boys left the room. Omaraeff lay back against the wall and closed his eyes. “So you see, Nikko my boy. Gold is everything.”
The Brasserie Heininger was quite mad that night, Khristo virtually ran from the moment he put on the waiter’s uniform until the first light of dawn. It was a sumptuous place. One ascended a white marble staircase to find red plush banquettes, polished mirrors trimmed in thick gold leaf, and burnished copper lamps turned down to a soft glow. The brasseries had been started by competing beer breweries at the turn of the century and they retained a Victorian flavor, each one designed to be that ever so slightly vulgar place where one could behave in an ever so slightly vulgar way. A place where a glass of champagne might find its way down a daring cleavage. The waiters were blind to it, their expressions unchanging grins. “Be merry!” Papa Heininger insisted. They were always on the move, carrying silver platters of crayfish, grilled sausage, salmon in aspic. It was all far too overdone to be anything but deliciously cheap. A place to let your hair down.
That night they had singing Germans, a table of fourteen, heavy red faces bawling out dueling songs as
