Blood of Victory by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online Page B

five stories high, with brass plaques announcing important companies and banks. Standing restlessly in front, scowling doormen, Turkish wrestlers with brass buttons on their uniforms. Deutsche Orientbank. Banque de la Seine. At the end of the street: Société Ottoman des Docks et Ateliers du Haut Bosphore.
Title! “On a certain cloudy morning in springtime, the bookkeeper Drazunov folded his newspaper under his arm and stepped off the Number Six trolley
...”
    Yes, one lied to them. Always. “Today a man talks freely only with his wife”—Babel had said that, the last time Serebin ever saw him—“at night, with the blankets pulled over his head.”
    He stopped at a Karagoz show, puppets made of camel hide, and stood at the edge of the crowd. Serebin was a man who truly hated puppets—hated the way they leaped and skittered about, the way they shrieked—but he was also a man who could no more pass by theatre in the street than he could fly. The Karagoz companies (Karagoz was Punch) wrote contemporary characters into their skits, so Serebin, in past trips to the city, had seen Mickey Mouse, Tarzan of the Apes, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo.
Greta Garbo? I’ll write you a puppet play about Greta Garbo—a love story. “Ow! Oh! Don’t punish me so, madame, I’m only the script girl!”
    He saw a bar he liked and sat at an outdoor table. They didn’t have vodka, so he drank instead some kind of delicious brandy. Made of apricots, probably, the waiter drew one on a napkin for him. Then, walking again, he came to a boulevard with a fragrant breeze. A certain scent he recognized: rotting seaweed, salt, coal smoke. His heart rose. A harbor. A view of the sea. Down this hill? He would go and see.
    7:20. A warm night for the season, cloudy and soft. No stars, when Serebin looked for them,
maybe later
. He always took émigré officials out for a good dinner, something most of them never got, so he scouted General de Kossevoy’s neighborhood on his way to the old man’s room and found a place with a basket of cucumbers in the window. When he peered inside he saw that it was crowded and noisy, steamy and smoky, the way he liked it, with harassed waiters on the run.
    But, wrong again. “If it’s all the same to you,” de Kossevoy said, “I’ve been meaning to look in at The Samovar, do you know it? The owner was one of my officers in the Urals and he’s always asking me to drop by.”
    Sodden kasha pierogi with suspiciously sour sour cream was the result of that, but de Kossevoy had smiled beatifically as they entered, his iron foot ringing out on the tile floor of the restaurant. The general’s foot had been blown off by a mortar round in Smolensk and, when the wound healed, a local blacksmith had forged a substitute. De Kossevoy seemed to get along with it all right. He walked with a stick, and you had to watch out for him at parties—Serebin recalled a bearded luminary at an official reception, his eyes squeezed shut with agony as de Kossevoy trod on his toes, while a supernatural effort at courtesy kept him from crying out.
    “Your excellency!” A humble shuffle and bow from the owner, hurrying past his empty tables.
    “Champagne,” Serebin said.
    “An attractive place.” That was the general’s verdict.
    Red velvet, red linen, tired from the years. “Oh yes,” Serebin said. “I think he does rather well.”
    “Later at night, probably.”
    “Mmm.”
    Serebin ordered everything.
Zakuski
of smoked fish with toasts, sorrel soup, veal patties, and the kasha pierogi. “You can fight a war on these,” the general said, a twinkle in his eye.
    “Stalin was always recommending rusks.”
    “Rusks!”
    “Tukhachevsky told me that.”
    “Your commander?”
    “Twice. Outside Moscow in the revolution, then in Poland in ’21.”
    “And, for his trouble, shot.”
    “Yes. You were with the Whites?”
    “Damn my soul. Under Yudenich.”
    “Not the worst.”
    “Pretty close. I was sixty-two years old when