Blood of Victory by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online

Empire, a vast mahogany affair with legs like Corinthian columns and ball feet. But time passed, empires drifted into ruin, coffee cups made rings, neglected cigarettes left burn scars, stacks of dossiers appeared and established a small colony, then grew higher and higher as a hostile world hammered on the national door. Or picked the lock.
    Major Iskandar, not very military in a rumpled uniform, had spectacles and a black mustache, with hair and patience thinning as he moved through his forties. He was chinless, with something waxy and unhealthy in his complexion, and reminded Serebin of an Armenian poet he’d once known, a great sensualist who died of drinking valerian drops in a sailors’ brothel in Rotterdam.
    Iskandar hunted through his dossiers until he found what he was after. “Well,” he said, “we’d planned to have a, a chat, with you when we saw the shipping manifest.” Suddenly annoyed, he snapped his fingers twice at the doorway to an outer office. That produced, a moment later, an orderly carrying two cups of black, sandy coffee. “But then, yesterday’s bombing on Rasim street...” He opened a dossier and turned pages. “Any theories? Who? Why?”
    “No, not really.”
    “Was Goldbark a friend of yours?”
    “An associate. I knew him as one of the directors of the IRU office.”
    “Been to his house?”
    “No.”
    “Met his wife?”
    “Maybe once. At some kind of event.”
    “The crate of eggplants was sent to him, specifically. Three other people died, there are five or six in various hospitals.” He offered Serebin a pack of cigarettes, then lit one for himself. “You got out, it would seem, just at the right moment.”
    “A telephone call.”
    “A warning?”
    “No.” Serebin’s voice was very cold.
    “Then what?”
    “‘Please meet me outside. It’s urgent.’”
    “And who was it?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “Really don’t?”
    “No.”
    “An unknown stranger calls, and you go charging off in the middle of a party held in your honor.”
    “‘An old friend’ is what he called himself. I thought that was possible, and the tone of the voice was serious, so I thought I’d better go.”
    The major tilted his head to one side, like a listening dog.
What do I hear?
Then decided that, for the moment, it didn’t matter. He leaned back in his chair and said, “This comes at a bad time for us, do you understand? There is a war going on in Europe, and we are under pressure from both sides. And in this country, and particularly in this office, we feel it. The more so because we know the thing is heading south. I could drive you up into Thrace, to the Bulgarian frontier, and there, in the border villages, you would see a new sort of tourism. Vacationing Germans, all men, in overcoats and alpine hats, with cameras or binoculars around their necks. It must be the birds, don’t you think? That makes them so passionate to be in the Bulgarian countryside in November?
    “And these days, where such tourists go, tanks follow. It isn’t far from here, maybe six hours. And much faster by aeroplane. It’s sad to see a city like London being bombed, night after night, terrible, a nice brick city like that. But here, of course, it wouldn’t be night after night. Because one night would be enough. A few hours’ work for the bomber pilots, and the whole thing would just, burn.”
    Serebin knew. Dense neighborhoods of old, dry, wooden houses.
    “So, we stay neutral, and treat every act of political violence as a potential provocation. A shooting, a stabbing, a bombing—what does it mean? Is it an
incident
? What comes next? Well, maybe nothing, in this case. It’s England and Germany we worry about these days. Russia maybe not so much—we’ve spent three hundred years worrying about them, so we’re used to it. Still, we have to be concerned, an attack of this sort, and our concern is, ah, concentrated by the fact that Goldbark was no virgin. There is at least some possibility that