Night Soldiers

of it. “You could regret it,” he had said.

She was affronted that he did not know she would do what he asked of her. As would her friends. A neighbor boy had been dispatched with what amounted to a queen’s message to her most favored ladies-in-waiting. When the boy returned, to accept a half-crown piece and a kiss that widened his eyes, the answer was yes in every case.

At which news she turned to him triumphantly and said, “So!” Gimlet-eyed, cheeks rouged in circles, lips carmine, something like a witch in a pageant, he thought, she announced, “Now you see what we are made of!” When her hair was brushed out in a wild blond spray, she began the lengthy process of pinning it up, driving each hairpin home with a determined thrust of her index finger. Next she ran about in her underwear, rummaging through her wardrobe, a final show for him before he left Prague. No matter what else might be going on, she wanted him to suffer a little for giving her up.

They gathered at midafternoon on March 25, a strange exfiltration team indeed, he thought, Uta and Erma and Marie and Bibi-he never knew which one was which-in a staggering variety of feathers and scarves and little hats and tail-biting fox furs slung carelessly around their powdered necks, and the little balding cab-driver called Rudi, who was already drunk and lurched between hysterical lust, surrounded by so much delicious flesh, and quaking terror, in contemplation of what he was about to do. His taxicab was a modified Skoda-a barrel of kerosene mounted on struts where the trunk had once been, a pungent black cloud boiling from the exhaust pipe when he started the thing up.

Because the taxi had no trunk, they put Khristo on the floor in front of the back seat, covered their laps and him with a giant eiderdown quilt, and rested their feet on his back. Thus he went to Bratislava.

They had told him, in Bari, that he should get out if he thought the Germans were on to him. “You might last a week,” they told him, “on the roofs and in the alleys, but it’s just a matter of time.” They had told him, if he was betrayed or identified or under suspicion, to go south to the Tatra Mountains, to join a partizan group and wait for Patton’s Third Army.

Well, Bratislava was south, at the foot of the Little Carpathians. And Voluta had died because there was more to the message than could be written on a slip of paper, so he had to ask himself what it might have been that could not be committed to writing. A request, he thought, please do this. And doing this did not just mean passing the information on to an intelligence service. Voluta, he believed, had been in Poland. When the Russians took over-people in Prague had spoken of it with fear in their eyes-he’d had to run. There was no plan, no technical arrangement, for him to go from Warsaw to Prague-the old escape route for Protestants fleeing religious persecution, across the Krknose Mountains in northern Czechoslovakia. He had just set out to walk it. And the Russians had got onto him. It was not the Gestapo in the automobile he had seen driving away from the bridge, of that he was sure. Then, there were the mechanics of the meeting itself-poorly planned, the work of a sick, exhausted man. He realized that Voluta, a lifelong craftsman of clandestine practice, had acted, in his last hours, like an amateur. No matter. Voluta, through his friends, had contrived to give him his freedom from prison and, years later, had died trying to tell him, tell him, in human words and not in secret notes, that Sascha Vonets had to be collected.

He could, perhaps, defend the decision to terminate FELDSPAR. The man who had fallen into the subbasement had been an SS Sturmscharfuhrer, a Gestapo sergeant. He would do as a reason if reasons were, sometime, to matter. And, somewhere, well back in the chain, was Ilya Goldman-for who else could have reached down into the Gulag system? BF 825 had finally become real, had taken on a life of its own, and he was now a prisoner of its obligations. That did not much worry him. What did was that Voluta had known where he was. The system that had contrived and supported the FELDSPAR mission had been somehow penetrated-by a friendly service, it was true, but who in turn might have a view of their operations? They were brave, the Americans, and ingenious to a fault, but they neither liked nor understood security. That took an iron fist, and they and their forefathers had fled the iron fists of the world since the beginning of their country.

He did not know what the OSS would think about it, would think about some colonel who said he would be in Sfintu Gheorghe on 12 April with what he claimed to be depth intelligence on NKVD personnel and actions. There were a million pieces of information every day in a war, like fish in the sea. Which one is the right fish? Someone, somewhere, would make a decision, a practical decision, a logistical decision, a political decision, finally, based on who had what power at any given moment, based-because the USSR was an ally-on the levantine politics of alliance, based on the positions of the planets and the stars. If it were one sort of a decision, they would be at Sfintu Gheorghe.

If not, not.

In the mad taxi, the first bottle of plum brandy was long gone by the time they got to Vlasim, the second well down before they reached Brno. German roadblocks stopped them every few miles because they were headed east, headed straight into the war, headed into Malinovsky’s Second Ukrainian Front that had swept up from the Danube and fought its way across the Dukla Pass in the Carpathians to attack the town of Nitra, only forty miles north and east of Bratislava.

Magda, in the front seat next to Rudi, took charge at the roadblocks. “We are on our way to a party, to see our Wehrmacht friends in Bratislava.” One last bash, apparently. The Germans saw no good reason to stop them. Khristo lay beneath the eiderdown and listened to the exchanges, his nose full of the mingled aromas of powder, scent, sweat and the alcoholic fume of the brandy. Driving away from the roadblocks, Rudi’s taxi left a pall of kerosene smoke as it went weaving back and forth across the road, making Khristo slightly seasick with unexpected swerves he could not balance against. Time and again, German military trucks and tanks drove them off the pavement while the women screamed with laughter at all the bouncing and jouncing and Rudi swore like a little madman.

Encountering them, some of the German sentries laughed wildly and shouted their approval in very graphic terms. They knew that Malinovsky was coming, they knew what would happen to them, yet behold these bosomy Czech girls, off to ficker their German boyfriends one last time. Twilight of the gods- spring, 1945. It appealed to their sense of doom.

Waved through the roadblock, the Skoda sputtered to life and off they went again, the women screaming at Rudi, insulting or praising his manhood. Rudi drove the taxi and they drove Rudi, singing dirty songs and working their way through a third bottle, pouring some down the driver to keep his courage afloat as the road began to curve and climb.

At one of the last sentry posts, a hand reached in through the back window and lifted the edge of the quilt where it lay over the knees of the woman closest to the door. Khristo froze, stopped breathing as the upper corner of his hiding place was peeled back. Then came the sound of a hand being slapped, six inches from his ear, followed by a raucous bedroom chuckle. “Bad Fritzi!” said a voice above him. “Trying to look up my dress? Shame on you and your naughty eyes, what would your dear Mutter say if she knew? ” There was more laughter, both within and without the car; the window was rolled back up and the taxi rumbled off, swerving back and forth across the road to Bratislava.

In Bratislava, they had boys strung up on the lamppost standards. These were not the old-timers, the ones who’d been in Russia and learned to survive anything; these were conscripts, sixteen and seventeen, and they’d faced the Russian guns and realized that Hitler was finished and nobody wanted to be the last one to die in the war. So they’d scampered over the nearest hill, planning to live in the woods like boy scouts until all the scary stuff was over and they could go home. The Gestapo caught most of them. Bound them hand and foot and hung them on short ropes from the lamppost standards, their shoes only six inches from the ground, each one wearing a hand- lettered paper sign around his neck on a string: Der Uberlaufer, “I am a deserter”-in the same way they used to make them wear the I am a dunce sign in school. Their eyes were wide open.

What worried Khristo in Bratislava was being dragooned by the Wehrmacht, given a rifle, and told to hold a position. His papers might be good here if he talked fast and convinced somebody that he didn’t need a travel pass outside Prague, but he wasn’t willing to chance it. They were getting ready to die in Bratislava and it had made them very serious. The city was much too quiet. He found an alley behind a bombed-out house, crawled down a hole into a watery basement, and waited until after midnight to move any farther.

The city was blacked out and deserted. Now and then he could hear the whine and rumble of tanks changing positions; the Second Ukrainian Front was shelling Nitra, forty miles away, coloring the night clouds with a reddish