Night Soldiers

at least clear the internal accounting. One might ask, however, what this Petrov is to you, that such a fine lunch is served on the occasion of his, ah, delivery.”

“Well, there one has to proceed by indirection-too much information will only confuse the issue. Let us say we are always anxious to be in your good books, and we know that he damaged one of our operations. For his own purposes, he traded one of our people to the Russians for someone he wanted back. Our operative had been of significant value, helping us to acquire information about the NKVD in Paris and elsewhere, a surprising amount of information. This Petrov found a way to ruin him, shall we say. You’re not going to feed him to Dr. Guillotin, are you?”

“We might. If the Russians found out he was involved in the Myagin business we’d almost have to. But, on the other hand, execution always turns out to be a noisy business-the official sort of execution, at any rate. Still, if there’s a way …”

Fitzware thought for a moment. “Oh well, serve him right if you did.” The Montrachet arrived.The cranes fly like summer nights,

their shadows on the sun.

No, not quite.The cranes fly like summer girls,

here but an instant, then …

No. One saw girls in the sky. Ridiculous.The cranes fly, like cranes.

No. Now his mind was tormenting itself.

The cranes fly like … How, in fact, did the fucking cranes fly? That was his problem. He’d never seen a crane or, if he had seen one, he didn’t know it was a crane. Someone had surely seen the cranes flying, for the accursed image had worked its way into the Russian mythos and stuck there like a dagger.

He leaned back in the hard wooden chair and sighed, looking out through the wire at a flat field of weedy grass. Above the guard towers, the sky seemed to stretch to the end of the world. Sascha Vonets was not meant to be a poet, that’s all one could say. It was just that his stubborn soul had, somehow, got into the habit of making soulful noises, and one had to do something or other about that, so his instinct had always been to chop up the thoughts so that they trickled down the page instead of marching, margin to margin, like a shock battalion.

He put the mutilated poem in a desk drawer and went back to his account ledger. The question was: what should the numbers say? This was harder, even, than cranes. One lived or died with this. So one had better get it right. Problem was, what did Brasovy want? To lie, the better part of the time, to tell Moscow what it wanted to hear just as he told Brasovy what he wanted to hear. Yet there had to be variation, otherwise the whole enterprise was simply too obvious, even for those straw-headed statues back in the Central Administration Office. Some days, one had to tell the truth so that, most days, one could tell the necessary lies. The analysis was correct, all right, but which day was today?

The production norms for the Utiny gold fields, in the Kolyma River region midway between the East Siberian Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk, were in no way possible to fulfill. In winter, the temperature fell to sixty degrees below zero and the wind blew like a demon’s rage. The workers lived on translucent soup and a few ounces of gritty bread and died like flies. The work sucked their first strength out of them in a matter of weeks. After that, they began dying-not too fast, not too slow-and their ability to shift rock and sand declined rapidly. The previous spring they’d eaten a dead horse. The horse had been dead for a while, when they found it, and they ate the maggots as well. Others had received a barrel of axle grease for their wheelbarrows, and they’d eaten that down to the wood. Some ate Iceland moss, just to put something in their bellies. When they failed to meet the scheduled production norms, dictated by Moscow, they were stripped and watered down and left to freeze in the cold-though not quite to death. In summer they were tied naked to a pole so that the mosquito swarms could eat on them for hours. But what drove them crazy, they said, was the sound of it. The falsetto whirr in the ears.

He had learned, somehow, not to know of such things.

He had built a wall and lived behind it.

He had survived. It was his grandmother who’d kept him out of the execution cellars in the Lubianka. There went the jewelry, the candlesticks, the silver, everything she had put by to survive in bad times. They had sent him east-to the northeast corner of hell, to be precise-with a thirty-year sentence. But he was alive. And he had a debt to pay, a debt to them, and by God’s grace he would stay alive long enough to pay it. To make them cry out in anguish, as they had made others cry out. To make them burn, as they had made others burn. To cut their hamstrings, as they had cut millions, and watch them come tumbling down.

The cruelest thing he had to admit to himself was that, in some strange way, he had never been happier. Suddenly, in this necropolis of ice and flatness and dead gray light, he had a reason to live, for the first time in his life. At last, there was something he wanted. He wanted to hurt them as they had hurt him. How simple and childlike life turned out to be once it was pared down to the basic elements.

And the funniest part of it-if anything could ever be funny again-was that they had been right!

There they were, killing left and right on pretext. On the phantom basis of a hostile glance, an indiscreet word, a beard drawn on a poster, anything, and, the greedy swine, leaving him alive. The one who had truly spied on them and, better yet, continued to do so. Drunken old crazy poet Sascha wandering about in a daze with his absurd heart dragging behind him on a chain, this posturing fool, this poseur, was digging up their buried secrets every chance he got.

First he had done it in Moscow, long before he’d gone to Spain, in Dzerzhinsky Square itself. Little nighttime trips to the files. What’s old what’s-his-face doing lately? This? Hmm. That? My, my. The other thing? Dear me. We’ll just write that down, in a private little code of our own, and make it into a word, and remember that word.

And one could remember, once they were set into meter and rhyme, a thousand words.

When he had first arrived at the camp, they had assigned him the job of general laborer. He was supposed to shift seven cubic yards of gravel a day. Wet gravel. He spit on his hands and set to it; it meant survival, a man was capable of anything when pressed. He shoveled till his muscles rang, till his heart squeezed like a fist. Worked as the mucus ran from his nose and his breath rasped and whistled. The trustee came around just before they were marched back to the camp. Vonets, he wrote, 503775, two yards.

No!

Yes. Truth was, perhaps a little over three, but one’s production had to be shared, with “others”-he’d get used to it, they had a system. What was he worried about? At that rate, he wasn’t going to last anyhow.

He had managed to become a trustee before death got him, but it had been a close thing. One by one, he’d worked his way through the camp NKVD, looking for the right one, the one in whom a spark of ambition still glowed. And, at last, found him. I am, he’d said, a writer of reports. The old trick had worked again, just as it had back in Moscow. He couldn’t fly a damned crane to save his soul but when they needed drivel, and they needed drivel, he was their boy. Fair-haired.

Transportational facilities on the above date were diminished by the reduction of one unit necessitating a restructuring of production goals on said date.

Which meant the horse had died.

They made him a clerk.

That meant he lived in a room with four beds and a stove, that meant he worked in an office where they stoked logs into the stove as though tomorrow would never come, that meant he got a fishhead in his soup every night and twelve extra ounces of bread a day, which meant he could stay alive, and, in turn, that meant he could plunge the knife into their hearts and twist with all his might. In time.

It meant, most important, that he had something to trade, because the little diary he had kept for so long had to grow, had to stay current, or it would be worth nothing. In the Kolyma it was as though time had stopped. The wind moaned in the fir trees and the world was white. Blank. Yet, somewhere, life went on, operations continued, changed, assumed new shapes, involved new people. All the little details kept piling up and he had to have them, he fed on them, and they kept him on fire and alive.

So. He watched the new arrivals. The chekists were easy to spot, in their leather coats and boots and their