Classic Spy Novels 3-Book Bundle by Alan Furst Read Free Book Online

pelicans took off from the sandbars in midstream, and the hills turned blue, the birches white, the bare willows brown. It was a world of great stillness, and they instinctively spoke in undertones.
    Antipin was no less a listener than he had ever been, and Khristo talked for hours. Mostly on the subject of Vidin and how life was there. Who was rich and who was poor. Lechery and drunkenness, religion and hard work, love and hate. It was like most places in the world, really, but Antipin sat and soaked the stories up with scrupulous attention. He was, Khristo came slowly to realize, learning it. On hearing the oft-told tale of Velchev’s wife and the borrowed chamber pot, Antipin recalled that Velchev’s wife was also Traicho’s daughter. Extraordinary. He knew the names of the fascists, the agrarians, the intellectuals who had supported Stamboliiski and the Peasant party.
    And he could, it seemed, do anything he turned his hand to and do it well. Cut wood shavings to start a fire, gut a fish, rig a shelter, steer the skiff around the gravel islands that dotted the river. If this was the world he was entering, Khristo thought, he would have to learn very quickly, but the challenge was not displeasing to him. He had been set apart, for the first time in his life, and felt that his fortunes had taken a sharp turn for the good.
    They moved past Kozloduj, past Orehovo and Nikopol. Past Svistov, where the Bulgarian poet and patriot Aleko Konstantinovhad been stabbed to death, where his pierced heart was exhibited in a small museum. Past the great city of Ruse, the grain port of Silistra. At the border, where the river flowed north into Romania, they pulled over and stopped at a customs shed. Antipin produced a Nansen passport in Khristo’s name, with a blurry photograph of a young man who could have been anybody. The Romanian customs officer accepted a makhorka cigarette and waved them through. It was, to Khristo, simply one more rabbit from the hat, one more specimen from Antipin’s collection of little miracles. He did wonder, once in a great while, what on earth made him worth such grand attentions, but these thoughts he put aside. There was enough of the East in him to take pleasure in the present moment and paint the future white.
    Moscow knocked him virtually senseless.
    They put him in a house—in pre-Revolutionary times the love nest of a wine merchant—on Arbat Street. But his training class was only just getting organized and they really didn’t want to be bothered with him. He had no money, but that did not prevent him from walking, from experiencing, for the first time in his life, the streets of a city.
    Winter had come early. The snow and the city swirled around him and, at first, overwhelmed his mind. On the river he had drifted into the easy numbness of a long journey, a traveler’s peace, wherein constant motion caused the world to slide by before it could make trouble. Thus he was unprepared for the city, and the sights and sounds drove themselves against his senses until he was giddy with exhaustion.
    And though the Moscow of his dreams—grand boulevards, golden domes—was as he had imagined, it shared the stage with a riptide of ordinary life. For every glossy Zil or Pobieda that disgorged important-looking people into important buildings, there seemed to be ten carts pulled by horses: the carts piled high with coal or carrots, the horses’ breath steaming from flared nostrils, the red-faced draymen drunk and cursing like maniacs. The streets were crowded with old women in black dresses and shawls, beardedJews in black homburgs, Mongolian soldiers with flat, cold faces. He saw a woman knocked down by a trolley, a bad fight between two men armed with broken vodka bottles. He imagined he could smell the violence in the air, mixed in with horse manure, coal smoke, and fried grease. A huge, bald, fat fellow urinated at the base of a pensive—chin on fist—statue of Karl Marx. Some militiamen happened