Serebin thought of saying “Reichsmarks,” which would save their lives, but he didn’t have any. Instead, he reached slowly into his pocket and threw money, mostly lei, on the snow. Marie-Galante took off her watch and her necklace and dropped them on the money. The man pointed to her hand, she added her wedding band.
“Passportul.”
Serebin produced his passport and tossed it on the ground. Marie-Galante searched her small evening bag, swore, mumbled something about the hotel room, then found hers. The older man picked them up, along with the money and the jewelry. He paged through the passports, saw the Ausweis and other German documents, then said “Franculor,” French, and tossed them away.
He spoke to the boy with the rifle. It sounded like a man talking to someone he knows is crazy-soothing, but firm. The boy lowered the rifle. The commander turned to Serebin and Marie-Galante, said, “Hotel,” and jerked his head in the direction they’d been going in the cab. When he saw that Serebin understood, he said, “La revedere, domnul,” good evening, and the two returned to the car. The searchlight went off, the car turned around and drove away.
Serebin saw the boy again, a few days later. Or maybe not, there was no way to be sure. He’d been hung from an iron bar that held the sign for an umbrella shop, and the face was quite different, but Serebin rather thought it was him.
THE GREEN SALON
5 January, 1941.
They watched it go on, for the next few days, sometimes from the tall windows in their room, the red and gold drapes tied back with braid, sometimes through the doors in the lobby, which looked out on an empty square and a statue of a brass king on a brass horse.
No windows in the lobby itself, only yellow marble pillars, settees in raspberry plush, Bordeaux carpets, mirrored walls, and, through a pair of arches, a green salon, with foreign newspapers laid out on low marble tables, and a gold-framed photograph of King Carol on an easel. In the green salon, one ordered Turkish coffee and listened to the fighting; around the royal palace, just next door, or the nearby police station. It was old Europe in the green salon, it smelled of araby-the scent, like violets, worn by Roumanian men, smelled of leather, of Turkish tobacco.
Sometimes the fighting stopped, and in the silence some of the guests went out for a breath of air and wandered through the streets, though not too far, to see what they could see. At dusk, on the third day of fighting, in the strada Stirbei Voda, Serebin came upon a bloodstain on the snow and a burning candle. He walked another block and saw, chalked on a wall, Homo hominus lupus est. Hobbes’s phrase, “It is man who is the wolf of mankind.” And what heartbroken citizen had dared, in the hours of street fighting, to do such a thing? Well, he was Serebin’s friend for life, whoever he was.
When the attack began-the traditional occupation of the national radio station, followed by the traditional plea for public calm and the traditional proclamation of a new regime-the Bucharest police, armed with pistols and rifles, had fought back, but they were no match for the legionnaires. Then the army appeared. Much the subject of rumors in the hotel lobby- the army has refused to leave its barracks, the army has gone over to the Guard. But then, very late on the second night, Serebin woke to the sound of cannon fire and saw a spectral Marie-Galante, nude and pale, staring pensively out the window. “At last, the army,” she said.
He joined her. Down on the strada Episcopiei, a group of artillerymen, in the sand-colored uniforms of the Roumanian army, were firing a field gun; a tongue of flame at the barrel, a shell tearing through the sky, then a distant explosion. And, on both sides of the street, as far as he could see, infantry, running from doorway to doorway, one or two at a time, going wherever the shells were going.
“It’s over,” Serebin said.
And, a day later, it was. In Bucharest, anyhow. For the time being.
Elsewhere, it continued. There were maps in the newspapers every day, and in some apartments, all across the continent, there were maps pinned to the kitchen wall. So it could be followed, studied, day after day, the war that went here, then there. To Libya, where British troops fought Italian units at Tobruk, to Albania, where Greek troops pushed Italian divisions back across the Shkumbi River and headed for Tirana. To northern Italy, where British warships from Gibraltar entered the Gulf of Genoa, shelled the city’s port, and bombarded the oil refinery at Leghorn.
That story was in the Tribune de Geneve, which Serebin read in the green salon, while eating a large sugared bun studded with raisins. At the next table, a thin woman wearing bright red lipstick, a fur stole around her shoulders, spoke German to a friend. “My dear, I cannot abide this Marshal Antonescu, ‘the Red Dog’ I think they call him. Is that because he is a communist?”
“No, my dear, it’s his hair, not his politics.”
“Is it. Well then, I do so hope the Guard will, ah, put him down.”
They both laughed, gaily enough, but it was not to be, and, a day later, as the snow melted beneath a winter sun, the captured legionnaires were taken away in trucks, or dealt with in the street. Still, it wasn’t over yet, not according to the hall porter on the fifth floor, who shook his head and was sorry about the way people were now.
That afternoon, Serebin and Marie-Galante went to the strada Lipscani house to make telephone calls. Rather vague and general- an acquaintance in Paris suggested…Would so-and-so be at home? Then Serebin took a tram out to a neighborhood of opulent homes, where a retired naval officer had coffee served in the conservatory and said he had never heard of DeHaas AG.
Serebin got away as quickly as possible, and found Marie-Galante waiting for him at the Lipscani house, just back from an hour with a prominent lawyer.
“What did he say?” Serebin asked.
“He said that some people preferred to make love only in the afternoon.”
“And then?”
“That some women required a firm hand to make them passionate.”
“And then?”
“I mentioned DeHaas. He gave up on the firm hand in the afternoon, and explained that the Roumanian legal system was dynamic, not static, that it followed the French, not the English model, particularly with respect to contracts concerning the disposition of agrarian lands.”
“Well, good, I was worried about that.”
“He went on. And on. Eventually, he showed me to the door, told me I was beautiful, and tried to kiss me.”
Dr. Latanescu, the economist, was dead.
And the Hungarian bank employee had returned to Budapest. But Troucelle, the French petrochemical engineer, seemed pleased with a French telephone call-made by Marie-Galante, the native speaker-and invited them to lunch at the Jockey Club. “I’m free tomorrow. Can we say, one o’clock?”
He waved and smiled when they came through the door, clearly delighted at the prospect of lunch. Which was quite good; a puree of white beans, boiled chicken with sour cream and horseradish, and a bottle of white Cotnari, from Moldavian vineyards on the Black Sea.
“The Burgundy negociants needn’t worry,” he said, tasting the wine, “but they don’t do so badly here.”
He was terribly bright, Serebin thought. Young and brisk and competent, a classic product of the Sorbonne’s Polytechnique, wandering abroad, like so many Frenchmen, to make his fortune in foreign lands. Over lunch they followed, as best they could, the Gallic prohibition, no discussion of work or politics at table, and made it just past the chicken-a considerable achievement given the situation in the city. Then Troucelle said, “I have to confess, I’ve thought and thought, but I don’t believe I actually know this Monsieur Richard you mentioned.”
“No?” Marie-Galante said. “He was here maybe two or three years ago, with a company called DeHaas.”
“Hmm. Could he have used another name?”
“Well, he could have. But why would he?”
Troucelle had no idea. “Of course you never know, with people, especially abroad.”
