فصل چهل و ششم

46

THE RIVER ESSONNE, smooth and dark, slid past the warehouse and beneath the black houseboat moored to a quay near Vert le Petit. Its low cabins were curtained. Telephone and power lines ran to the boat. The leaves of the container garden were wet and shiny.

The ventilators were open on the deck. A shriek came out of one of them. A woman’s face appeared at one of the lower portholes, agonized, cheek pressed against the glass, and then a thick hand pushed the face away and jerked the curtain closed. No one saw.

A light mist made halos around the lights on the quay but directly overhead a few stars shone through. They were too weak and watery to read.

Up on the road, a guard at the gate shined his light into the van marked Café de L’Este and, recognizing Petras Kolnas, waved him into the barbed-wire parking compound.

Kolnas walked quickly through the warehouse, where a workman was painting out the markings on appliance crates stenciled U.S. POST EXCHANGE, NEUILLY. The warehouse was jammed with boxes and Kolnas weaved through them to come out onto the quay.

A guard sat beside the boat’s gangway at a table made from a wooden box. He was eating a sausage with his pocketknife and smoking at the same time. He wiped his hands on his handkerchief to perform a pat-down, then recognized Kolnas and sent him past with a jerk of his head.

Kolnas did not meet often with the others, having a life of his own. He went about his restaurant kitchen with his bowl, sampling everything, and he had gained weight since the war.

Zigmas Milko, lean as ever, let him into the cabin.

Vladis Grutas was on a leather settee getting a pedicure from a woman with a bruise on her cheek. She looked cowed and was too old to sell. Grutas looked up with the pleasant, open expression that was often a sign of temper. The boat captain played cards at a chart table with a boulder-bellied thug named Mueller, late of the SS Dirlewanger Brigade, whose prison tattoos covered the back of his neck and his hands and continued up his sleeves out of sight. When Grutas turned his pale eyes on the players, they folded the cards and left the cabin.

Kolnas did not waste time on greetings.

“Dortlich’s dog tag was jammed in his teeth. Good German stainless steel, didn’t melt, didn’t burn. The boy will have yours too, and mine and Milko’s, and Grentz’s.” “You told Dortlich to search the lodge four years ago,” Milko said.

“Poked around with his picnic fork, lazy bastard,” Grutas said. He pushed the woman away with his foot, never looking at her, and she hurried out of the cabin.

“Where is he, this poison little boy who kills Dortlich?” Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. “A student in Paris. I don’t know how he got the visa. He used it going in. No information on him coming out. They don’t know where he is.” “What if he goes to the police?” Kolnas said.

“With what?” Grutas said. “Baby memories, child nightmares, old dog tags?” “Dortlich could have told him how he telephones me to get in touch with you,” Kolnas said.

Grutas shrugged. “The boy will try to be a nuisance.”

Milko snorted. “A nuisance? I would say he was nuisance enough to Dortlich. Killing Dortlich could not have been easy; he probably shot him in the back.” “Ivanov owes me,” Grutas said. “Soviet Embassy security will point out little Hannibal, and we will do the rest. So Kolnas will not worry.” Muffled cries and the sound of blows came from elsewhere in the boat. The men paid no attention.

“Taking over from Dortlich will be Svenka,” Kolnas said, to show he was not worrying.

“Do we want him?” Milko said.

Kolnas shrugged. “We have to have him. Svenka worked with Dortlich two years. He has our items. He’s the only link we have left to the pictures. He sees the deportees, he can mark the decent-looking ones for DPC Bremerhaven. We can get them from there.” Frightened by the Pleven Plan’s potential for rearming Germany Joseph Stalin was purging Eastern Europe with mass deportations. The jammed trains ran weekly to death in the labor camps in Siberia, and to misery in refugee camps in the West. The desperate deportees provided Grutas with a rich supply of women and boys. He stood behind his merchandise. His morphine was German medical-grade. He supplied AC/DC converters for the black-market appliances, and made any mental adjustments his human merchandise required in order to perform.

Grutas was pensive. “Was this Svenka at the front?” They did not believe anyone innocent of the Eastern Front could be truly practical.

Kolnas shrugged. “He sounds young on the telephone. Dortlich had some arrangements.” “We’ll bring everything out now. It’s too soon to sell, but we need to get it out. When is he calling again?” “Friday.”

“Tell him to do it now.”

“He’ll want out. He’ll want papers.”

“We can get him to Rome. I don’t know if we want him here. Promise him whatever, you know?” “The art is hot,” Kolnas said.

“Go back to your restaurant, Kolnas. Keep feeding the flics for free and they will keep tearing up your traffic tickets. Bring some profiteroles next time you come down here to bleat.” “He’s all right,” Grutas told Milko, when Kolnas was gone.

“I hope so,” Milko said. “I don’t want to run a restaurant.”

“Dieter! Where is Dieter?” Grutas pounded on a cabin door on the lower deck, and shoved it open.

Two frightened young women were sitting on their bunks, each chained by a wrist to the pipe frame of the bunk. Dieter, twenty-five, held one of them by a fistful of her hair.

“You bruise their faces, split their lip, the money goes down,” Grutas said. “And that one is mine for now.” Dieter released the woman’s hair and rummaged in the manifold contents of his pockets for a key. “Eva!” The older woman came into the cabin and stood close to the wall.

“Clean that one up and Mueller will take her to the house,” Dieter said.

Grutas and Milko walked through the warehouse to the car. In a special area bound off by a rope were crates marked HOUSEHOLD. Grutas spotted among the appliances a British refrigerator.

“Milko, do you know why the English drink warm beer? Because they have Lucas refrigerators. Not for my house. I want Kelvinator, Frigidaire, Magnavox, Curtis-Mathis. I want all made in America.” Grutas raised the cover of an upright piano and played a few notes. “This is a whorehouse piano. I don’t want it. Kolnas found me a Bösendorfer. The best. Pick it up in Paris, Milko … when you do the other thing.”