flooded but the police wouldn’t let anybody exit to the street. So they crossed over, took a train back one stop, and walked. The quarter was a snarl of freight tracks and old factories surrounding the Renault plant and the large docks on the Seine. On the other side of the river was a Russian neighborhood— emigres packed into brick tenements and working on the automobile assembly lines.
Under German occupation, Renault manufactured military vehicles for the Wehrmacht, so the British bombed the plant. De Milja and Fedin’s messenger crunched broken glass underfoot as they walked. Water flooded from broken mains, black smoke that smelled like burning rubber made de Milja’s eyes run and he kept wiping at them with his hand. An ambulance drove by, siren wailing. Where a building had collapsed into the street, de Milja stepped over a smoldering mattress, picking his way among scattered pans and shoes and sheet music.
At the Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint Basil, the young man stood back. Tears ran from his eyes and cut tracks in the soot on his face. “He’s in there,” he said to de Milja.
“The church?”
The young man nodded and walked away quickly.
The church was being used as an emergency room. General Fedin was lying on a blanket on the stone floor, a second blanket was drawn up to his chin. When de Milja stood over him he opened his eyes. “Good,” he said. “I hoped they’d find you.”
De Milja knelt by his side. Fedin’s face, once fierce and skull-like, had collapsed, and his skin was the color of wax. Suddenly, an old man. He lowered the blanket a little—gauze bandage was taped across his chest—and made a sour face that meant
“Better for you to be in the hospital,” de Milja said. “Fastest way is a taxi, you’ll lie on the backseat.”
“Let’s not be stupid,” Fedin said gently. “I know this wound very well, I’ve seen it many times.”
“Vassily Alexandrovich . . .”
Fedin gripped his arm, he meant to grip it hard, but he couldn’t. “Stop it,” he said.
De Milja was silent for a time. “How did this happen?”
“I was at the Double Eagle, a Russian club, people playing chess and drinking tea. The sirens went off, like always. We shrugged and ignored them, like always. The next thing, somebody pulled me out from under some boards. Then I woke up here.”
He paused a moment, lips pressed tight. “I’m sixty-three years old,” he said.
It was dark in the church, a few candles the only light. People were talking in low voices, taking care to walk quietly on the stone floors. Like actors in a play, de Milja thought. Some still wore the costumes— cabdrivers, cleaning women—that exile had assigned them, but in this church they were themselves, and spoke and gestured like the people they had once been. Outside, the last sirens of police cars and ambulances faded away and it was quiet again.
“I always thought I’d die on a horse, on a battlefield,” Fedin said. “Not in a chess club in Paris. You know I fought at Tannenberg, in 1914? Then with Brusilov, in Galicia. Against the Japanese, in 1905. In the Balkans, 1912 that was, I was on the staff of the Russian military attache to Serbia. 1912. I was in love.”
He smiled at that. Thought for a time, with his eyes closed. Then looked directly at de Milja and said, “Jesus, the world’s a slaughterhouse. Really it is. If you’re weak they’re going to cut your throat— ask the Armenians, ask the Jews. The bad people want it their way, my friend. And how badly they want it is the study of a lifetime.”
He shook his head with sorrow. “So,” he said, “so then what. You step into it, if you’re a certain sort. But then you’re taking sides, and you’ve written yourself down for an appointment with the butchers. There’s a waiting list—but they’ll get around to you, never fear. Christ, look at me, killed by my own side.” He paused a moment, then said, “Damn fine bomb, though, even so. Made in Birmingham or somewhere. Didn’t hit any factories, this one didn’t. But it settled with the Double Eagle club once and for all. And it settled with General Fedin.”
Fedin laughed, then his mood changed. “Listen, I know all about what you did on the docks that night. Running off to die because you couldn’t stand to live in a bad world. What the hell did you think you were doing? You can’t do that, you can’t
He sighed, wandered a little, said something, but too quietly for de Milja to hear. De Milja leaned closer. “What did you say?”
“I want to rest for a minute, but don’t let me go yet,” Fedin said.
De Milja sat back, hands on knees, in the gloom of the darkened church. He looked at his watch: just after one in the morning. Now the night was very quiet. He sensed somebody nearby, turned to see a woman standing next to him. She had gray hair, hastily pinned up, wore a dark, ill-fitting suit, had a stethoscope around her neck. She stared at Fedin for a long moment, knelt by his side and drew the blanket up over his face.
“Wait,” de Milja said. “What are you doing?” She stood, then put a hand on his shoulder. He felt warmth enter him, as though the woman had done this so often she had contrived a single gesture to say everything that could be said. Then, after a moment, she took her hand off and walked away.
17 April. 3:20 a.m. West of Bourges.
Bonneau drove the rattletrap farm truck, Jeanne-Marie sat in the middle, de Milja by the window. They drove with the headlights off, no more than twenty miles an hour over the dirt farm roads. The truck bounced and bucked so hard de Milja shut his mouth tight to keep from cracking a tooth.
Three-quarter moon, the fields visible once the eyes adjusted. With airplanes on clandestine missions, you fought the war by the phases of the moon. “The Soulier farm,” Jeanne-Marie said in a whisper. Bonneau hauled the wheel over and the old truck shuddered and swayed into a farmyard. The dogs were on them immediately, barking and yelping and jumping up to leave muddy paw marks on the windows.
A huge silhouette appeared in the yard, the shadows of dogs dancing away from its kicking feet as the barking turned to whining. A shutter banged open and a kerosene lamp was lit in the window of the farmhouse. The silhouette approached the truck. “Bonneau?”
“Yes.”
“We’re all ready to go, here. Come and take a coffee.”
“Perhaps later. The rendezvous is in forty minutes and we’ve got to walk across the fields.”
The silhouette sighed. “Don’t offend my wife, Bonneau. If you do, I can reasonably well guarantee you that the Germans will be here for generations.”
Jeanne-Marie whispered a curse beneath her breath.
“What? Who is that? Jeanne-Marie?
They entered the farmhouse. The stove had been lit to drive off the night chill. On a plank table there was a loaf of bread and a sawtooth knife on a board, butter wrapped in a damp cloth, and a bottle of red wine. Madame Soulier stood at the stove and heated milk in a black iron pot. “We just got this from Violet,” she said.
De Milja teetered dangerously on the edge of asking who Violet was—then from the corner of his eye caught Jeanne-Marie’s discreet signal, a two-handed teat-pulling gesture.
Madame Soulier gathered the skin off the top of the milk with a wooden spoon, then whacked the spoon on the rim of the zinc-lined kitchen sink to send it flying. “That’s for the devil,” she muttered to herself.
De Milja knew this coffee—it was the same coffee, black, bitter, searing hot, he’d drunk in the Volhynia before going hunting on autumn mornings. He held the chipped cup in both hands. The cities were different in Europe; the countryside was very much the same.
“And the Clarais cousins? They’re coming?” Bonneau said.
Soulier shrugged. It scared de Milja a little, the quality of that shrug. He understood it, he feared, all too well—the Clarais cousins hadn’t shown up where they’d promised to be since the spring of 1285, likely tonight would be no different. Jeanne-Marie’s face remained immobile, perhaps the Clarais cousins were not crucial to the enterprise but had been asked for other reasons.
“Townspeople,” Soulier said to him, a confidential aside that explained everything.
“Better without them?” de Milja asked.
“Oh yes, no question of that.”
Soulier sucked up the last of his coffee and emitted a steamy sigh of pleasure. He rose from the table, pushing with his hands on the plank surface, then said, “Must have a word with the pig.”
