Night Soldiers

courtyard where it was nighttime from dawn to dusk. He rented the room from an old Jew bent in the shape of a C, with black sidelocks, beard, coat, and hat. “Who wants you, little one?” the man asked in Russian. “I don’t understand,” Khristo answered in French. The man nodded to himself. “Oh, pardon me then,” he said in Russian.

The thought of Aleksandra’s things in the treasure box, left to be pawed by the landlady, haunted him, but a return to the room was out of the question. Surely they had him spotted at Heininger as well, but it was less likely that they would snatch him there. He considered finding Yasin again, in the Turkish quarter out on the Boulevard Raspail, and acquiring another weapon, but he put it off. Ilya had given him a telephone number-that was his best weapon now. Had Ilya set him up? Kept him at the cemetery while Aleksandra was taken? Perhaps. Perhaps Ilya had been set up to set him up. At least he knew where he was now. On the NKVD chessboard, all his moves known and predicted, hostile knights and bishops dawdling while he figured out how to move onto the very square where they wanted him. Somehow, it didn’t matter. Fate was fate. He would play the game out to checkmate, they would all meet again in hell.

Sweating in the late June weather, he stood in a telephone cabinet at the neighborhood post office while the call was put through. They answered on the first ring. He merely said, “I want a meeting.” They told him to be at the church of St.-Julien-le-Pauvre at 6:30 the following morning.

For early mass, Ilya was in worker’s clothing, a copy of L’Humanite, the communist daily, folded under one arm. Khristo watched him move slowly down the aisle, kneel briefly, then enter the pew. They were virtually alone, the place was empty except for a few shawl-covered women in the front row and a priest who sped through the rite in mumbled Latin. The high ceilings held the church in soft gloom as the first sun touched the tops of the windows.

“You are very quick,” Ilya said, speaking in an undertone. He glanced at Khristo suspiciously. “Twenty-four hours,” he mused. “Have you considered a career in this business?”

“I want her back,” Khristo said, his voice tight with anger despite an attempt at neutrality. “Do what you like with me, but let her go.”

“Who?”

“She calls herself Aleksandra.”

“I’m sorry,” Ilya said, “I know nothing about this.”

“You lie,” Khristo said.

“No. Not true.”

“I may just cut your throat right here, Ilya. You’re close enough to heaven for a speedy trip.”

“Khristo!”

“Blasphemy? You don’t like it?”

“Stop it. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“To hell with you, then.” He stood, began to move down the pew toward the aisle.

“Khristo, wait, please,” Ilya called in a loud whisper.

He remained standing, but moved no farther.

“They are outside. All over the place. They’ll cut you down.”

“In front of a church? In the street in broad daylight?”

“Yes, of course. Just like Myagin.”

“Good. You’ll die first.”

“You think they care?”

Khristo sat down again and shook his head in disbelief. “You feel no shame, Ilya. How do you do it? “

“Don’t attack me, Khristo. I am trying to help you. Fold up your scales of justice and put them away and don’t make judgments. I know nothing of this Aleksandra, but I promise to do whatever I’m able to do. There are so many of us, you see, each one under orders, and it is all compartmentalized, so one doesn’t always know-”

“Enough! We’re here to bargain …”

“We are not. There is no bargain.”

“Then what?”

“Give us Myagin’s murderer, Khristo.”

“First the girl.”

Ilya gestured no and closed his eyes for a moment. “Please,” he said gently.

“Omaraeff,” Khristo said.

“Who is he?”

“The headwaiter at Brasserie Heininger. A Bulgarian.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“I don’t know. Patriotism, perhaps. There is a chance the British are involved.”

“And you? Are you involved?”

“Marginally, Ilya. I did a small favor, then I walked away from it.”

“You didn’t like the plan?”

“No, Ilya, no. I had something. For the first time in my life, just living like a plain man. Working at a job. Coming home to a woman. Nothing I did mattered at all. It was a joy, Ilya. Incomprehensibly a joy.”

“I am sorry.”

“Can you get her out?”

“I don’t know. You remember how it is-all blind passages. But I swear to you I will try. I have friends, I’m owed favors. But I must be discreet.”

“Can I walk out of here?”

“No. I must leave first. Then you will be left alone.”

He thought about the signal, its simplicity. All Ilya had to do was let him go first, and he would be dead in a few seconds. “God help you, Ilya,” he said.

“Let me help you first. If this Omaraeff is pressed, will he sing your name?”

“A certainty.”

“Very well. That I can fix.”

“I don’t care.”

“So you say, but I want you alive. For the other …”

“You must,” Khristo said, pleading.

Ilya nodded, looked at Khristo for a moment, then stood. “Goodbye, my friend,” he said and offered his hand.

Khristo did not take it.

Ilya shrugged, tucked L’Humanite beneath his arm, and walked up the aisle.

He saw them as he left the church-some of them. One in a car. Another reading a newspaper in the little park that surrounded the church. A tourist couple-at seven in the morning! — taking pictures of the Seine on the other side of the quai. His picture too, no doubt. As he turned north, a car pulled out of a parking space and trailed him. It was the battered Simca that had appeared one night in early spring as he walked home. He remembered the driver, drunk and grinning as he aimed the car up the middle of the street. They had, he realized, been with him for a long time.

How long? Had Vladi Z., his companion in the internment camp, been one of them? If so, they had been running him, an unknowing provocateur, since the day he left Spain. And he had fled from Madrid after a telephone call from none other than Ilya Goldman. Yet Yaschyeritsa’s threats had been real enough. Or maybe not. Had they tried to panic him that far back?

A bullet-headed thug, with pale hair sheared to a bristle, swung out of a doorway and matched his pace. All sorts of specialists, Ilya had said, were now operating in Paris. The city would be crawling with them. He knew that NKVD search brigades, the sort of units that descended on suspicious activity in the villages, could be ten thousand strong. Not that they would try anything like that in France, but they had people in abundance and they used them abundantly.

He wanted to go to the bookstore where he had met Aleksandra, and he wanted to go alone, so he lost the cars by taking the Metro for two stops. That left him with Bullet-head and a fat-faced man in the Moscow version of a business suit. They stayed with him as he wandered around the back of the Fifth-the university quarter-among students hurrying to early class at the various facultes of the Sorbonne scattered through