Free Blood of Victory by Alan Furst

world.”
    Serebin wondered if he meant time or politics. Maybe both.
    “People who trust you will get hurt,” Bastien said. “Is a dead Hitler worth it?”
    “Probably.”
    They were silent for a time. Somebody was singing, downstairs, somebody drunk, who knew the words to the song the musicians were playing.
    “I don’t worry about your heart, Ilya. I worry about your stomach.”
    Holding a cupped hand beneath the gray ash on the cigar, Bastien walked over to a table beside the bed and took an ashtray from the drawer. Then he settled back down on the ottoman and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “So now,” he said, “we will put you to work.”
    The train rattled along through the brown hills, the sky vast and blue and, to his eyes, ancient. They had talked for a long time, in Room 4, the life of the Club Xalaphia all around them; banging doors, a woman’s laughter, a heavy tread in the corridor. “I will tell you some truth,” the man on the ottoman said. “My real name is Janos Polanyi, actually von Polanyi de Nemeszvar—very old Magyar nobility. I was formerly Count Polanyi, formerly a diplomat at the Hungarian legation in Paris. I got into difficulties, couldn’t get out, and came here. A fugitive, more or less. Now, for you to know this could be dangerous to me, but then, I intend to be dangerous to you, perhaps lethal, so a little parity is in order. Also, I don’t want you hearing it from someone else.”
    “Can one be a former count?”
    “Oh, one can be anything.”
    “And the Emniyet, do they know you’re here?”
    “They know, but they choose not to notice, for the moment, and I’m careful to do nothing within their borders.”
    “What about, well, what we’re doing here?”
    “This is nothing.”
    Polanyi, then. With a few questions, he’d led Serebin back through his life: his mother, fled from Paris to Mexico City in 1940, now waiting for a visa to the United States. His younger brother, fourteen years his junior, always a stranger to him and everybody else, a cosmetics executive in South Africa, married to a local woman, with two little girls. His father, returning to the army in 1914, taken prisoner, it was reported, during the Brusilov offensive in the Volhynia in 1916, but never heard from again. “Too brave to live through a war,” his aunt said. Thus the history of the Family Serebin—life in their corner of the world spinning faster and faster until the family simply exploded, coming to earth here and there, oceans between them.
    As for his mother’s sister, Malya Mikhelson, a lifelong chekist. Her last letter postmarked Brussels, but that meant nothing.
    “The INO, one would assume.”
Inostranny Otdel,
the foreign department of the secret services. “Jews and intellectuals, Hungarians, foreigners. Not in the Comintern, is she?”
    He didn’t think so. But, who knew. He never asked and she never said.
    They stared at each other, sniffing for danger, but, if it was there, they didn’t see it.
    “And money?”
    God bless his grandfather, who had foreseen and foreseen. Maybe, in the end, it killed him, all that foresight. He had prospered under the Czar, selling German agricultural equipment up and down the Ukraine and all over the Crimea. “Paradise, before they fucked it,” Serebin said. “Weather like Provence, like Provence in all sorts of ways.” Old Mikhelson felt
something
coming, cast the Jewish tarot, put money in Switzerland. A Parisian office worker earned twelve hundred francs a month, Serebin got about three times that.
    “Can you invade the trust?”
    “No.”
    “Ah, grampa.”
    And the Germans? Was he not, a
Mischlingmann,
half-Jewish?
    No longer. His German friend had arranged for a baptismal certificate, mailed to the office of the Paris Gestapo from Odessa.
    “You asked?”
    “He offered.”
    “Oh dear,” Polanyi said.
    Serebin spent all day on the train, after a few hours of bad dreams at the Palas Hotel. There’d been a room reserved in his