“Yes?”
The other clerk behind the desk, a heavy man with a dark, lustrous pompadour who kept the hotel books, looked up attentively, it was always interesting to hear about good news.
“Madame at the cremerie — in the rue Mabillon? Has a grand Cantal. If you go over there you can still get some.”
Serebin thanked him. Nothing like this had ever happened before, but the French character was dependably eccentric and sudden changes of weather were no surprise. He started to turn away from the desk, headed up to his room, when the man grabbed him by the wrist.
“Now, monsieur. Right away. For the Cantal.” The clerk’s hand was gripping him so hard it trembled.
Serebin went cold. The envelope from the courier was in the inside pocket of his jacket. To carry two identities was a cardinal sin of clandestine practice, but Serebin had meant to hide the envelope at the IRU office.
“Now, please.” A glance and a nod at the ceiling — they’re up in your room.
A few feet away, the bookkeeper put his hand on the telephone-the one used to call the rooms. The clerk saw him do it, turned toward him, and, for a long time, the two men stared at each other. This was nothing less than a struggle for Serebin’s life, and Serebin knew it. A fierce, silent struggle, no sound in the lobby, not a word spoken out loud. Finally, the bookkeeper cleared his throat, a small self-conscious gesture, and took his hand off the phone.
“I’ll show you where it is,” the clerk said. “The cremerie. ” He let go of Serebin’s wrist and walked around the end of the desk. Turning to the bookkeeper, he said, “Keep an eye on things, will you?” Then added, “Monsieur Henri.” His first name, spoken in a normal tone of voice, dry and pleasant, but there was anathema in it, clear as a bell.
The clerk took Serebin by the elbow-he’d fought for this prize and he wasn’t going to let it get away-and walked him to a door that led off the lobby and down a stairway to the cellar of the hotel. This was bravado, Serebin thought, profoundly French bravado. The old man knew the bookkeeper wouldn’t pick up the phone once he’d left, and so virtually dared him to do it.
At the foot of the stairs, a dark passage, past ruined furniture and abandoned trunks, past carriage-horse harness and a rack of unlabeled wine bottles sealed with wax, the Winchester’s private history. Another stairway led up to street level and a heavy door. The clerk took a ring of keys from his pocket, asked Serebin to light a match, finally found the right one, and opened the door.
Outside, an alley. Serebin could see a street at the far end.
“Take care, monsieur,” the clerk said to him.
“Who were they?”
A Gallic gesture-shoulders, face, hands. Meaning who knows, to begin with, but more than that: they are who they always are. “Three of them, not in uniform. One in your room. Two nearby.”
“Well, thank you, my friend.”
“Je vous en prie, monsieur.” My pleasure.
He was at Anya Zak’s apartment an hour later. He’d gone first to Ulzhen, but the concierge said they were out for the evening. “So,” she said, when she opened the door, “now you see the truth.” The real Anya. Who wore two heavy nightgowns, a pair of French army socks, and wool gloves, one green, the other gray.
Serebin sat on the couch, the empty box on his lap. Anya Zak stood over a hot plate and began to boil water for tea.
“I should tell you,” he said, “that I am a fugitive.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
“Really. What have you done?”
“Nothing much.”
“Well, whatever it is, I hope it’s very bad. Reprehensible.”
“Can I stay here, Anya?”
She nodded yes, and measured out tea from a canister as she waited for the water to boil. “There are people, you know, who say you do things.”
“People are wrong.”
“Are they? Well, even so, I’m proud of you.”
He slept on the couch, under his overcoat-she insisted he take the blanket but he wouldn’t. Neither of them really slept. They talked in the darkness, once the lights were out, about countries and cities, about what had happened to people they knew. Then he thought she’d fallen asleep. But he could see her shape beneath the covers, restless, moving around, turning over. At one point, when it was very late, she whispered, “Are you asleep?” He almost answered, then didn’t, and breathed as though he were.
THE EMPRESS OF SZEGED
26 March. Belgrade.
Or so the British cartographers called it. To the local residents it was Beograd, the White City, the capital of Serbia, as it had always been, and not of a place called Yugoslavia, a country which, in 1918, some diplomats made up for them to live in. Still, when that was done, the Serbs were in no shape to object to anything. They’d lost a million and a half people, siding with Britain and France in the Great War, and the Austro-Hungarian army had looted the city. Real, old-fashioned, neoclassical looting-none of this prissy filching of the national art and gold. They took everything. Everything that wasn’t hidden and much that was. Local residents were seen in the street wearing curtains, and carpets. And, ten years later, some of them, going up to see friends in Budapest, were served dinner on their own plates.
Serebin’s train arrived at dawn, a flock of crows rising to a pink sky from the station roof. His departure from Paris had turned into something quite like an escape-effected with the aid of Kacherin, of all people, the world’s worst poet. Because Kacherin, who wrote saccharine verse about his mother, was also Kacherin the emigre taxi driver, and for Serebin, once he declared himself a fugitive, the Gare de Lyon was out of the question — everybody was arrested there. So he gave Anya Zak money to buy him a valise and some clothes to put in it, and Kacherin drove him all the way to Bourges-he’d only asked for Etampes-the demarcation line for the Unoccupied Zone. An unexpectedly useful accomplice, Kacherin, who eased them through checkpoint after checkpoint with a hesitant smile and a nervous laugh. “Missed his train,” Kacherin told the Germans, making a bottle of his fist, thumb out, pinkie raised, and tilting it up to his mouth, while Serebin accommodated the fiction by holding his head in his hands. Oh those Russians.
Thus Kacherin did, in the end, turn out to have talent, it just wasn’t what he wanted it to be. They talked all the way to Bourges-that was at least, Serebin speculated, part of the reason Kacherin agreed to take him. Talked and talked. About poetry, about history, stars, bugs, tarot, Roosevelt. The man had a passion for the minutiae of the world-should he perhaps consider writing about that? No, shut up and be nice, Serebin told himself, an admonition delivered in the voice of his own mother.
Not so good in Belgrade.
The bar at the Srbski Kralj-King of Serbia, the hotel in town-was throbbing, mobbed with every predator in the Balkans, anonymous men with their blondes mixed in among knots of foreign correspondents. Serebin counted four different languages, all in undertones of various volumes, on his way across the room.
“Ah, Serebin, salut. ”
Here you are, at last. Marrano was glad, relieved, to see him. Introduced him to the two pale Serbs, in air force uniform, who shared his table, “Captain Draza and Captain Jovan,” smoking feverishly and radiating conspiracy from every pore. Ranks and first names? This was either sinister or endearing, Serebin couldn’t decide which. Maybe both. Russians and Serbs, Slavs who spoke Slavic languages, could understand each other, and Captain Draza asked him where he’d come from.
“Paris.”
“How can you live there?” They practically spit-living under German occupation was clearly outside their
