Night Soldiers

out-of-service locomotives and came up with something more than seven thousand lost carloads. And this sort of thing, he assumed, would happen throughout the French rail system.

The transport officer wasn’t such a bad fellow. In all likelihood he would have appreciated, once restored to his more reflective self, the words of the saboteur’s British briefing officer as he reviewed the plaque tournant procedure: “For want of a nail, dear boy, and all that sort of thing.”

In the winter of 1944, on a night when the mountain was still and silent, when snow hung thick on the pine boughs and white fields shone blue in the moonlight, Khristo Stoianev went to war. As they’d meant him to do.

The priest who had released him from a cell in the Sante prison had barely spoken, but the intent of the action was self-evident. He was free. Free to fight the common enemy. The time and place he must choose for himself. Khristo sometimes thought about the priest: a small, stooped man, unremarkable, invisible. A perfect emissary for Voluta, his church, and NOV, the Polish Nationalist organization. Khristo knew that someone had kept track of him, had known he was in the Sante, but that was no surprise. His training and experience gave him, when the time was right, a certain value, and the NOV priests would be aware of that value. Priests made excellent intelligence officers, he knew; the Vatican was said to have the world’s finest intelligence service, calling on the accumulated experience of seven centuries. Father Voluta-it seemed a strange idea. But Ilya had claimed it to be so, and Ilya knew things.

Others, certainly, had been set free from French prisons as the German tank columns neared Paris and the fall of France was imminent. Like Khristo, they had been jailed because they were dangerous. Now, for the same reason, they were released. It was one of the first ways a defeated country could fight back. That the French had let him go at the behest of the Poles surprised him not at all. The two conquered nations were old friends, sharing a taste for romanticism and idealism that had got them every sort of misery for a hundred years. But they shared also a near pathological conviction-that romanticism and idealism would in time be triumphant-which made for a battered old friendship but a durable one.

Khristo walked quietly from the bedroom of the old house that had been his refuge, the polished wood floor cold on his bare feet, and dressed from a large closet in the adjoining alcove. Thick wool socks, corduroy trousers suitable for working dogs in the field-a gentleman’s roughwear-wool sweater, and an old coat, shapeless but warm. Good high boots that laced up tight. From a peg on the inside of the closet door he took a Hungarian machine pistol-Gepisztoly M43-on a leather strap. It had cost four chickens, three dozen eggs, and a bottle of brandy, but it made them comfortable to have a weapon in the house. He smiled as he handled it; Sophie had oiled the cheap wooden stock as though it belonged to a fine gun kept on an estate. But then, Sophie had altered the corduroy trousers so that he could wear them, had knitted the sweater and the socks-unraveling fashionable items from better days in order to do so-and, come to that, had polished the floor as well. All her life she had done these things and saw no reason to stop just because of the war. Perhaps the war was all the more reason to do them.

He took four loaded magazines from the closet shelf and put two in each pocket of the coat, then tiptoed down the hall to Sophie’s bedroom to say good-bye. Her bed was empty, a heavy comforter folded neatly at the foot. Next door, where Marguerite slept, it was the same. He listened and, very faintly, heard the sound of plates and silverware in the kitchen on the first floor. Years of service, he realized, had schooled the sisters in the preparation of breakfast without waking the house.

Prison had changed him.

He came to understand that on his first day of freedom. The Nikko Petrov papers were no longer of use, so he walked restlessly about the streets of the city-frantic knots of people on one block, deserted silence on the next-as it waited to see what Occupation might bring. Eventually, he found a young man approximately his height and size and strong-armed him in a doorway, taking his passport. He bought glue in a papeterie, then found a cafe, pried his photograph from the Nansen document and made himself a French passport. The franking marks across the corner of the picture did not quite match, but one had to look carefully to see that. He ordered a steak, ate it so fast he barely noticed the taste, then left the cafe with the steak knife in his pocket. A few blocks away he found a mont de piete-“mountain of piety,” as the French ironically termed their pawnshops-held a knife to the pawnbroker’s throat, and stole a small French pistol. He could have bought it, he had money from the priest, but he knew that money meant survival and he intended to survive. Nearby, he saw a finely dressed gentleman getting into a car, held him at bay with the pistol, and drove away in the car, a five-year-old Simca Huit, dark blue, with nearly a full tank of gas. For as long as he was able, he drove south and west. Away from the advancing Germans, headed for the coast or, perhaps, Spain. He would accept whatever the fates offered.

But the farther south he drove, the worse the nightmare. The roads were clogged with people and their possessions, cars had been pushed into the fields when they would no longer run, abandoned cats and dogs were everywhere. He saw a woman pushing a baby carriage with a grandfather clock in it, he saw unburied dead by the side of the road, bloated and flyblown in the early summer heat. The anarchy of flight was exacerbated by Stuka bombing runs on the refugee columns so that people had to run for the ditches and, here and there, a tower of smoke rose into the sky from a burning car.

The Germans had learned the tactic in Spain, refined it in Poland: clogged roads made reinforcement and supply impossible-tanks would simply not drive over their own people, at least not in this part of Europe. So the Stukas’ objective was to sow panic and terror among the fleeing civilians, and they buzzed low along the roads for a long while before they used their machine guns or dropped a bomb.

This effort was aided, on the ground, by German agents who spread horror stories and rumors among the civilian population. Khristo came upon such a man at dusk on the first night, holding the terrified attention of a small group of refugees by the roadside with stories of German atrocities. Khristo stopped the car and stood at the edge of the crowd and listened to him, a master storyteller who didn’t miss a detail: the screams, the blood, the horror. He was a heavy, blunt-featured man who clearly enjoyed his work and was adept at it. When Khristo could no longer bear the looks on the faces of the listeners, he pushed his way through the crowd and took the man by the scruff of the neck. “This man is trying to frighten you,” he said. “Don’t you see that?” They stared at him, paralyzed, not understanding anything at all. In disgust, Khristo marched the man behind a tree and chopped his pistol’s trigger guard across the bridge of the man’s nose. The man yelped and ran away across the field, bleeding all over himself. But when Khristo turned back to the crowd he saw that they too had run away. He had frightened them, had only made it worse.

On the second day, somewhere on the N52 where it ran along the Loire between Blois and Tours, the car began to stall. All day it had crept along, in first and second gears, stopping and starting, locked in the stream of cars and bicycles and people on foot. By now, the Simca was full-and heavy: a mother and daughter, the latter having somehow injured her knee, a wounded French artilleryman who sang to keep their spirits up, and an old woman with a small, frightened dog that whined continually. His passengers got out of the car and sat in a resigned group among the roadside weeds while he opened the hood. The smell of singed metal from the engine reminded him of the flight from Madrid, only here no little man on a bicycle showed up to help. Perhaps it wants water, he thought, treating it more like a horse than a car. Someone volunteered a bottle and he slithered down the bank to the edge of the Loire, holding the bottle against the gravel and letting water trickle in. It was peaceful by the river; cicadas whirred in the heat, a small breeze stirred the air.

“Ah, monsieur, thank God you have come.”

He turned toward the voice and discovered the woman he would come to know as Sophie. She looked to be in her middle fifties, with anxious eyes and a broad, placid face. She wore a “good” dress, black with white polka dots, sweated through in circles beneath the arms. He must have looked puzzled, for she elaborated: “We have been praying very hard, you see.”

“Oh?”

“Please,” she said urgently, “there’s little time.”

Around the curve of the river he found another woman, similar to the first though perhaps somewhat younger-he took them to be sisters-and an old man in a formal white suit laid back against the grassy bank. His tie was undone and his face was the color of paper. The younger woman was fanning him with his hat. Khristo knelt by his side and placed two fingers against the pulse in his neck. The beat was faint and very fast and the man was comatose, an occasional flutter of the eyelids the only sign of life.

“I’m afraid I can do nothing,” he said. “This man is dying, he needs to be in hospital.”

The elder sister answered a little impatiently. “We know he is dying. But he must receive unction, you see, the last rites, so that his soul may rest peacefully in heaven.”