Free Night Soldiers by Alan Furst Page B

was quite thoroughly clear. Nikko's affront to authority and his own flight eastward had placed his remaining family in grave danger, and Helena had determined to sacrifice her happiness on behalf of her parents' lives. No Vidin child of his acquaintance would have done any less. He knew of Teodor Veiko, an older man, child of Veiko's youth. A drunkard, a violent man. But Helena was clever, would wind him around her thumb. The rest of the message was this: you cannot come home. That it should arrive on the day when his thoughts might well be expected to turn in that direction was no coincidence and he knew it.
    “The news is good?” Akhimova asked.
    “Yes, comrade Lieutenant, as good as can be expected.”
    She leaned over his shoulder, he felt her bulk near him, and pretended to read the letter for the first time. She squeezed the tender place between his shoulder and his neck. “Be brave, Khristo Nicolaievich,” she said softly. “Be a good soldier.”
    They had him.
    The first step was to comprehend it. The second was to form, in the privacy of his mind, the words themselves—a reading of the sentence. He was held by a system based on the portcullis, a medieval security tactic no less effective for its age. A system of two gates. A visitor entered through the first gate—no questions asked. It locked behind him. He was now confronted by a second gate, held a virtual prisoner in a small space. Above his head, the walls were honeycombed with arrow slits and fighting ports. For the moment, only questions came from above. If the answers were found to be good, they opened the second gate. If the answers—or the stars, or the cast of the dice—were found to be not good, they did not open the second gate. After that, the disposition of the prisoner was more a matter of whim than tactics. The portcullis was a system based on the medieval assumption of evil in all men—again, a notion no less effective for its age—and the certain knowledge that any visitor carried your destruction in his hand, intentionally or not, a spy's gold or the Black Death.
    Thus they had him and he knew it.
    He could not go home. He could only move in the direction they pointed out—pray God you understood where they were pointing, pray God you did not make a misstep along the path. The lesson of The Mistake had been sharply staged for him in the departure of Ozunov. The major had permitted a spy to flourish in his house. Perhaps he was a witting accomplice, perhaps not. But, they said, we have no time to find out. No wish, either. The New Science is ingenious in that way: motive is unimportant. Why does not matter, only that . And the New Science is economical. An arrest, if properly managed, is also a lesson. Thus we make what we have go further, thus we spend wisely.
    But they—the masters, the unseen—had incorporated a tiny flaw in their structure. It was endemic, they could do nothing about it. As Oriental rugs are woven with a single imperfect strand—that the weaver not be seen to compete with Allah, who is the only perfection—their system had one defect. It was not perfectly dark. Some light got in. For the more they trained Khristo in their methods, the more he understood their logic. It was a problem they couldn't overcome, but they knew it existed and they watched closely, and watching was their greatest skill.
    Thus they had him but he knew it.
    The way home was closed. They had let him know that with the letter. He realized also that Antipin had operated openly in Vidin on purpose, that secrecy had not been his intention. If the fascists were after you, to whom could you turn? To the East, of course. Now, let us provoke the fascists: they will drive the sheep, we shall have the wool.
    That winter, Khristo Stoianev learned to bear weight.
    He understood the system in that way: a great heavy mass that pressed down upon you, that kept you struggling and gasping to remain, in any sense at all, upright. It crushed the mind because