Night Soldiers Quotes

“Live today, for tomorrow we die.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency- showing wise kinds and blissful martyrs- while bankers wept and peasants starved.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“When you are done living for yourself, only then do you learn that living for others is the privilege,’ Renata”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“We are afflicted with a darkness of the soul and fall in love with our pain.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“It made her—a bizarre trick—long for a past that was still in the future.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The sun?" Goldman said in an unguarded moment. "I hear they've shot it.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“A certain type—he knew them all too well from years of experience as a detective, he knew how they acted, how they spoke, how their minds worked. These were people who would do anything to win at what they saw as the game of life, who had no allegiance to anyone or anything beyond themselves, who were gifted liars, who could scheme their way into almost anyone’s confidence, then betray them without hesitation.”
― Alan Furst, A Hero of France

“There is an enormous body of literature, fiction and nonfiction, written about the period 1933–1945, so Alan Furst’s recommendations for reading in that era are very specific. He often uses characters who are idealistic intellectuals, particularly French and Russian, who become disillusioned with the Soviet Union but still find themselves caught up in the political warfare of the period. “Among the historical figures who wrote about that time,” Furst says, “Arthur Koestler may well be ‘first among equals.’ ” Furst suggests Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a classic story of the European intellectual at midcentury.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The priest took him to the front entry of the prison, then pushed at the grilled door set into one of the tall gates. The iron hinges grated briefly as it swung wide. For a moment, the city beyond the prison overwhelmed him with the sounds and smells of ordinary life and, for that instant freedom itself was palpable, as though he could touch it and see it and capture it in his hands. Then his eyes filled with tears and he saw the world in a blur.

“Blagodarya ti, Otche.” He needed, in that moment, to speak the words in his own language. Then added, in French, “It means ‘thank-you, Father.' ”

The priest closed his eyes and nodded, as though to himself. “Go with God,” he said, as Khristo walked through the door.

[...]

The elder sister answered a little impatiently. “We know he is dying. But he must receive unction, you see, the last rites, so that his soul may rest peacefully in heaven.”

Khristo scratched his head. [...] He turned back toward the man. “I cannot say it in French,” he said.

“No matter,” the elder sister replied. “God hears all languages.” Then, as a slightly horrified afterthought: “You are Catholic, of course.”

“Of course,” he said.

He was Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox—closer to Catholicism than a Protestant, in theory, but the rites were different and the customs not at all the same. From his training he knew that European Catholics expected “Hail Mary” and “Our Father” and an Act of Contrition. What he was able to offer, however, were predsmurtna molitva, prayers for the dying. There should have been soborovat, elders, present to pray a dying man into the next world, but God would have to forgive this requirement. As for the prayers themselves, they were supposed to be improvisational, in whatever form was appropriate to those present. He therefore leaned close to the man—whispering so quietly that the sisters could not hear him—and asked God to ease his entry into heaven, to forgive him his sins, and to unite him with those he'd loved in this life who had preceded him. Finally, returning to the Catholic tradition, he anointed the man with river water in place of holy oil, touching his face in the sign of the cross and saying, in French, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” The man's lips were cold as snow, and Khristo suppressed a shiver. “Go to God,” he added, then stood, indicating that the ritual was concluded.

[...] Khristo only pretended to mull it over. There was a debt to be paid, to a French priest, more particularly to those whose sacrifices had enabled him to appear at the Santé, and Khristo meant to repay it by service in the one trade he knew. Thus, on a clear night in December, he ate fresh bread and warm milk in the kitchen, accepted the tearful embraces of Sophie and Marguerite, and, long before dawn, walked out across the fields with the machine pistol slung over his shoulder. His boots crunched the hard crust of snow and he marched in time, the brilliant moonlight casting a soldier's shadow before him.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“The article was taken from the business page of a newspaper in Manhattan, and it said that Miss Faye Berns had been appointed fund-raising director of the New York office of the World Aid Committee, which would seek to assist Displaced Persons in returning to their homelands once the war ended. The article was brief, but it did give the address of the World Aid Committee, and he copied it out on a piece of paper.

In the photograph, a three-quarter angle, he could see the changes. Her hair was shorter, there was a line to her jaw that hadn't been there before, and she had smiled for the photographer in a way that he didn't recognize. It was an artificial smile, posed and official.

For a long time he stared at the photograph, shocked by the degree to which memory had betrayed him, deceived him. Because he had always remembered her as she was in Paris, on the afternoon they had met by accident in the bookstore. He had, unwittingly, frozen her in time, kept her as she had been on a June day in 1937. He remembered her as she cried for Andres, remembered her as someone who would dare to love a man like Andres, who did not desert him, who paid the price of that love, and then survived. He remembered her as a girl who had flung herself against the world without caution, without a care for her safety. Now she was a woman who had grown up to accept the artifice of a smile, poised and confident, for a newspaper.

He remembered, particularly, both times they had touched: when she had slept on his shoulder in the car parked at the Bilbao docks, and when she had held his hands while they waited for the train to depart at the Gare du Nord. Did men and women ordinarily remember the times when they'd touched each other? He did not know.

[...] He bore down on his work for the rest of the afternoon, then, since it was Thursday, went off to visit his woman friend.

She was, as usual, responsive, falling in with his mood and treating him with a certain casual tenderness that he'd always found very comforting. Yet he was not his best self, distracted by the image of a woman with a professional smile in a grainy photograph. He imagined himself a great realist, and that passion without sentiment suited him perfectly. But at work on Friday morning he experienced a surge of emotion, more gratitude than love, and sent his friend a bouquet of flowers. For which she thanked him, with a certain casual tenderness, the following Thursday.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“You've read his file?” The voice picked up a little.

“Not allowed.”

“Shit.”

“The junior officer is confined to knowledge of tactical intelligence. Strategic intelligence is the sole responsibility of senior staff. Section three. Paragraph eight.”

“More shit.”

“I quote you gospel.”

“You are like a market peddler, Khristo, like a Jew you count kopecks. Tactical intelligence. Strategic intelligence. The difference between waiters' gossip and ambassadors' gossip. What notions, really. The thoughts of men whose backsides have grown into their chairs.”

Khristo laughed.

“I'm funny. That Sascha, he will make you laugh.”

“Thank God.”

“I'll miss you.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“In late September of 1945, [...] finally, one last passenger appeared, walking slowly from the great dark structure that covered the pier and blinking at the bright sunlight.

There was something different about this one, Muriel thought. He had black hair set off by pale skin, and deep blue eyes over high cheekbones. Striking, she thought, if you liked that Slavic type. He walked slowly, with a slight limp, and once touched a place on his left side as though it hurt him. Wounded, she realized. Wounded in the war, and now coming home.

Or was it home? He appeared to be very nervous, stopping at the pier entrance and tugging at the jacket of the light gray suit he wore. With dark blue shirt and yellow tie he was clearly what Muriel would call a “greenhorn,” a newcomer, an immigrant. She could see it in his eyes—how he looked and looked, trying to take in everything at once, struck with fear and joy and excitement over finally setting foot in America. Well, she thought, he would learn what it was, he would find his place in it. They all had.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“There was the faintest trace of light in the church, filtering in from a high window. He moved slowly down an aisle between wooden benches until he reached the altar. “Sascha?”

There was no answer.

To the left of the altar, out of the sightline of the benches, was a pole ladder. He walked to the base of it, slowly, and looked up to see the edge of a loft. “Sascha, it's Khristo. Stoianev. I've come to take you away, to take you to freedom,” he said in Russian.

There was no answer. [...] He kicked something, a plate by the sound of it, which went skittering away across the floor. There was an orange flame and a pop and he fell backward, landing on his back and taking the ladder down with him. “Oh no,” he said. He got to his hands and knees and crawled past the altar, down the aisle between the benches, shouldered the door open and rolled himself down the three steps to the dirt street, then wedged himself between the steps and the wall of the church.

He tore at his clothes until he found it. He couldn't see very well, but it was midway up his left side, just below the ribs, a small hole like a nail puncture, with blood just beginning to well from the center. As he watched, the blood made a droplet that swelled until it broke loose and ran slowly down his skin. He covered the wound gently with a cupped hand, as though it embarrassed him. It hurt a little, like a cut, but there was a frightening pain on the left side of his chest and he realized that he was gasping for air.

[...] “You killed me,” Khristo said, voice sorrowful and tired. The pain in his chest was fierce and there was no air to breathe. [...] From his kneeling position, Sascha fell backward and sat on the ground and began to sob, clutching his face in his hands.

He began to have a dream, and in this dream Lake Murigheol was violet, like the lakes he had seen from the deck of the Brovno. Such a place seemed to him remote, difficult to approach. The driver of the taxi would argue and say there was no road and the rest of the money would have to be given to him and still he would not go and finally Sascha would put the gun against the back of his neck—the old place—and call him names in Russian until he turned the key in the ignition. Then later Sascha would remember that the “Red Banners” poem had been left in the church and they would have to go back and then start all over again. Then they would drive across fields on flat tires with the driver howling and swearing and Khristo bleeding and Sascha crying and waving the gun around and finally they would reach Lake Murigheol. There would be a seaplane, of course, with the usual freckle-face American pilot and some gangly fellow in a blue suit and vest and tie, and eyeglasses that made him look like an owl, standing there like a diplomat and holding a submachine gun away from his side so the grease wouldn't get on his suit, and he would be tense as the pilot fired up the engines and they began to move across the darkness of the violet lake, and he would ask if the villagers of Sfintu Gheorghe had enjoyed the party which he—fortunate one indeed—had given them. And he would see that Khristo was shot and he would be concerned and Khristo would pass out and come to and pass out again and wake to a moment when the plane quivered and roared and made white plumes of the violet surface until they lifted up and just barely over the tops of the trees and he realized that he was going home now on a new river and that only when he got there would he find out where home was and what it was like and how that river ran and the last thing he thought was that he hoped he would like it there.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“She had small bressts, they moved as she dried his hair and he touched them. “Be good,” she said, wriggling away from his hands. But he pulled her down on the bed next to him and, when she began to say the sort of things that always provoked him, when she began to tease him, he stopped her and made love to her in a way that was not their usual fashion. He made love to her from the heart, and when it was over she had tears in her eyes and he held her so tightly that his hands hurt.

[...]

The end of the war was coming; it would be like a dawn, the living would sigh with relief and set about to change the world. He wanted to see it. He wanted to live. It would be the best of times to start a new life. Trieste. A part of Aleksandra's fantasy. Something about the place had always intrigued her. Perhaps she had been right. In Trieste, he knew, there were Slavs and Italians living side by side—he would not have to be an émigré, an alien, he could just be a man.

[...] Kulic took him some way up the mountain—they had to walk very slowly, and Khristo helped him in the difficult places—to an open meadow, a sloping field with mist lying above the long grass and a row of wooden boards set in the ground. One of them was marked Aleksandra —1943

Khristo stood with his hands in his pockets, his face wet in the rain.

"[...] She fought with us, first as a courier, then with a rifle. We took a German supply column in October of 1943—mules with mortar rounds strapped to them. And when the thing was finished we found her curled up behind a tree and she was gone. The magazine of her rifle was empty, Khristo, she bore her share of it and more.

“While she was with us, she used the cover identity that Goldman had provided for her. But then, as the war went on, she began to call herself Aleksandra. So, when we brought her up here, we marked her grave with that name only, as we believed she would have wished. From Ilya, I knew her story, but she never spoke of you, or of Paris, but neither did she take a lover.”

“Thank you for bringing me here,” Khristo said.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“In Paris, in the early hours of June 11, 1940, Khristo Stoianev lay awake in his cell in the Santé prison and planned his “escape.” […] His had been, he knew, a classic descent. He had braced his mind early on, willed himself to meet imprisonment as he had met other events in his life. “A man can survive anything.” He did not know where he'd heard it but he believed it, believed in it, a religion of endurance. Thus he had taken his formless days and nights and imposed on them a rigid system of obligations. Exercise—physical strength can forestall psychological collapse, a universal and timeless prisoner's axiom. Use the mind. He created a private algebra of propositions and wrestled with their solutions, mining his past life for usable circumstance: How long would it take for a man carrying his own food and water to walk in a straight line from Vidin to Sofia? From mental images of maps he contrived a route, crossing roads, streams and mountains, estimated the weight of water and food, determined the point of efficiency that lay somewhere between thirst and starvation and exertion of strength: the goal of the exercise was to arrive at the outskirts of Sofia carrying no provisions, crawling the final hundred feet.

Keep a diary. They would give him no paper, so he used the surfaces of opened-up matchboxes he bought from the prison store with his meager stipend, and kept records in pin-scratched hieroglyphs—a plus or minus sign, for instance, indicated success or failure in the two-hour mental exercise period for that day. Control is everything. He permitted himself only one hour a day for daydreaming, which was always erotic, violently colored, tones and textures scrupulously perfected by his imagination. Retain any connection at all with the world. Every moment of his time in the exercise yard he spent talking with other prisoners. [...] But time—hours that became days that became months—was a killer of extraordinary stealth, and his spirit slowly failed him. He began to die. He watched it with slow horror, as a man will observe an illness that consumes his life. He would come to himself suddenly and realize that his mind had been on a journey into a violent universe of shimmering colors and bizarre shapes. He understood what was happening to him, but his understanding counted for nothing. Without the daily texture of existence to occupy it, he learned, the human soul wavers, wanders, begins to feed upon itself, and, in time, disintegrates. He saw them in the exercise yard, the clear-eyed, the ones who had died inside themselves. Thus, at last, he came upon the prisoner's timeless and universal conclusion: there is nothing worse than prison.

From the gossip in the exercise yard, he knew that Wehrmacht columns were approaching Paris and that the country would fall in a matter of days. In shame, he prayed for this to happen. Bulgaria had joined Germany, Italy, Hungary and Romania in an alliance against Western Europe. He was, no matter the Stateless Person designation of the Nansen Commission, a Bulgarian national, thus nominally an ally of the Germans. When they took Paris, he would send them a message and offer his services. Initially, he would make his approach as Petrov, the former waiter, imprisoned for striking a blow against the Bolshevists. They would approve of that, he knew, despite their treaty of convenience with Stalin, and would more than likely accept him on that basis. If, perchance, they knew who he really was, he would brazen it out. Yes, he had fought them in Spain. But witness, Herr Oberst, this change of heart. Witness this attack on the NKVD itself—could they doubt his sincerity after that? He marveled at how the past could be refigured to suit the present, at how fragile reality truly was when you started to hey doubt his sincerity after that? He marveled at how the past could be refigured to suit the present, at how fragile reality truly was when you started to twist it.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Andres came in but she [Faye] did not see him, not really, she saw the man who stood by his side. Immediately she began writing short stories about him, because his presence came to her in metaphors. Eyes like tank slits. He had blue eyes hidden away in there, and black hair and pale skin and square hands. He wore a dark blue shirt buttoned at the throat and a soft gray suit, and when he leaned over, formally, like a Slav, to shake her hand, she could see an automatic pistol holstered at his waist.

Andres was so dear to her, he approached her always like a clumsy man asked to hold—but only for a moment or two while its owner was occupied—a priceless glass vase. She lived in this body every minute of every day, it was just herself. But to him she was treasure. He ran his soft hand along her body and said silk. To be glass and gold and silk was a great honor, she knew, but she also knew it took living up to.

The curious thing about Andres was that he was two people. Quite distinctly two people. Andres at a distance was a malleable, hesitant man who moved invisibly in the crowd. But when he spoke, he changed. He was, then, the opposite of malleable and hesitant. Spending time alone with him in a room, you met the strange thing that lived inside him: a fierce and clever animal, a beast that might hunt you down if it decided you'd somehow hurt it.

For some reason, Andres had not expected her to be there. He was unpleasantly surprised and his eyes moved around too much. For the sake of appearances he introduced the other man, but gobbled his name so that it was simply a syllable or two. The man took her hand briefly—here and gone. His face seemed closed with tension. The two of them, Andres and his friend, made together a magnetic field of such exclusionary force that she was surprised her very body did not fly right out the window.

But they could go to hell.

She too fought in this war and what she had learned about war was that slowly but surely it sucked your strength right down to the marrow. She held this ground. And her forces were arrayed about her. The jazz on the radio, the quilt, the book, the bed—the two men would attack at their peril.

So they left. Andres mumbling something or other, the Slav honoring her with a little bow. His eyes were curious, she noticed, finding everything in the room, taking a few notes, and finding her as well.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“In one corner of the window, however, was a hole about the size of a one-franc piece, with a fine web of fracture lines about it — something had been poked through the wire mesh by a former occupant. Khristo was thankful to the man, whoever he had been, because it meant he could see a tiny piece of the sky over Paris. At dawn, when the bell woke him up, it was the first thing his eyes sought and, again and again, in the course of the endless days, he spent hours staring at it. Sometimes it was a pale and washed-out blue, after a rainfall, perhaps. Other times it was a vivid blue, which meant cool, sunny weather. Sometimes it was gray. Sometimes, the best of all times, a part of a white cloud could be seen.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“All the German Jews were in a very difficult situation — only the lucky and clever ones could leave the country now. A most curious thing had occurred when the three refugees docked at Ellis Island for immigration processing. A well-dressed man had appeared and offered to buy their clothing. All of it — even the underwear and socks. Not only had he paid them, he had given them excellent American clothing in exchange. After that experience, who could convince them that they were not in the promised land?

[…] Since Colonel Donovan had persuaded Roosevelt that America needed an intelligence service, life had come to resemble a lunatic asylum. Rossell had some considerable experience in this work, a career in army intelligence going back ten years. As early as 1937 — when war had seemed inevitable to him — he'd run small preparatory operations when his superiors would allow it, stockpiling European clothing, for instance, by purchasing it from incoming refugees, then storing it in a warehouse under squares of cardboard markeddo not clean! Because of his foresight, agents going into Europe would, at least, not be dressed by Brooks Brothers.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“She had been born in the countryside, she said, somewhere in the South of France, but of a family, she claimed, from elsewhere. Arrived in Paris at sixteen, alone, without money, and survived. Her father, according to the time of day, had been a gangster, a poet, or a nobleman. She had never met him, she said, and had few memories of her mother—carried off by the influenza epidemic of 1919. She had been raised by an aunt, or rather, a woman who called herself aunt, or, perhaps, a woman who had known her aunt. None of her stories was ever told the same way twice and he finally gave it up—acknowledged inconsistency the only effective defense against a trained interrogator—and consigned her to the present moment, which was where she wanted to be in the first place.

[...] Of her former lovers, whoever they might have been, he had no time to be jealous. The world seemed intent on rushing off its cliff, so, like everyone else, he lived for the moment and hung on tight. The lipstick grew crimson, hairdos were twisted about in bizarre shapes, and in some dresses a woman simply could not sit down. Affairs begun on Friday were over by Wednesday. And every woman in the world seemed to want him, sensing, he guessed, what went on in the little room. At Heininger, the screechy English girls pressed apartment keys into his hand, absolutely bent on having it off with the working class, and an evil-looking Slav at that. He smiled wistfully and returned the keys, regret for the lost opportunity showing clearly in his expression, hoping that such chivalry would spare him their anger.

If he was tempted at all, it was the French women who caught his attention, especially the ones a few years older than he. It was the single glance on the street that undid him, gone in the very last instant before it actually meant anything. His eyes would roam hungrily after them as they trailed their wondrous perfume away down the avenue, leaving him to sniff great nosefuls of Parisian air. What was that?

But Aleksandra, who smelled like soap, or lemons, or someone who had just been in the hot sun, was more than enough for him, so he prayed at one church only and, soon enough, woke to discover that love had got him.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Ozunov paced up and down and addressed the backs of their heads, his hands clasped behind him.

“On your desk are sealed envelopes. Do not touch them. Also a pair of knitting needles. Do not touch them, either. We presume you to know what they are, much as we presume that you have never used them.”

They laughed politely.

[...] He paced silently, his boots slapping the scrubbed wooden floor, and breathed with a fury. “The point is, comrades, you don't know. Not such a difficult solution, is it? You don't know because the letter is sealed. It could be birthday greetings from the Belgian consul. It could be a love note from the stable boy. It could be anything. Now, how shall we discover this elusive truth?”

Kerenyi: “Take the letter out and read it.”

“Brilliant! You shall now all do exactly that. When I give the word, you have ten minutes. Oh, by the way …” He stopped, leaned over Voluta and spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “Don't tear the envelope. We don't want the gentleman to know that someone is reading his mail. And here's a hint, little as any of you deserve it, use the knitting needles.”

[...] Khristo Stoianev held the letter in one hand, the envelope, still sealed, in the other. The letter read: Meet at noon by Spassky Tower.

Ozunov could feel his heart beating. It was the throb of the prospector finding golden flecks in an ordinary rock. What was this? A magnificent discovery, to be wrapped carefully and delivered, in all humility, to his superiors? Or something else. Something bad. Something very, very bad indeed. He began to sweat. Closed his eyes, reviewed the last few weeks in his mind.

Khristo had discovered the small, unsealed slit at the side of the envelope where the glue line ended. He had squeezed the envelope so that the slit bulged slightly; peering inside, he had seen the fold of the letter within. Carefully, he ran one needle inside the fold, then inserted the second needle between the top of the fold and the upper edge of the envelope flap so that the needles sandwiched the fold of the letter between them. With great patience, he began to rotate both needles, and soon the letter became a tube of paper with the needles at its core. When he had the whole letter, he drew it toward him through the slit.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“He said good-bye, in his mind, to Aleksandra. Since the night of the brasserie shooting he had telephoned the contact number for Ilya many times, but the call was never answered. It was not disconnected, it simply rang, in some empty place somewhere — he imagined an anonymous trading company — and there was no one present to pick up the receiver. But he was wrong about this, for he had tried the number (just once more )in early July and reached a busy signal. He knew, intuitively, what that meant. There was somebody by the phone, somebody under orders not to answer it. He imagined the Russian clerk, love-struck in Paris, chancing one little telephone call to a special friend. […] He had also watched the newspapers for discoveries of the unidentifiable bodies of young women. There turned out to be a lot of those, poor souls dragged from the river. Times were hard, people got tired of their lives.

He was tired of his own. His stomach twisted in knots over what lay ahead of him in a French prison, but somehow he could not bring himself to feel "trapped" or "captured." He was already in prison — a prison of borders, passports, false names, and de facto nonexistence — a citizen of nowhere. He remembered the train ride back to Moscow from Belov, the dark realization of a homeless, wandering future. So it had been written, so it had turned out to be. Cruel of the fates, he thought, to let me taste this place, to know it, and then to take it away.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Intelligence operations, he [Khristo] had discovered, consisted principally of driving a car for hundreds of kilometers, sifting through an infinity of reports and memoranda, endlessly locking and unlocking the metal security boxes assigned to each officer, and writing up volumes of agent-contact sheets. In the latter regard, thank heaven for Sascha. The drunker he got, the better he wrote. And he had such mastery of Soviet bureaucratic language — a poetry of understatement and euphemism — that Yaschyeritsa mostly left them alone. That was fine with Khristo.

[…]

Drunken old crazy poet Sascha wandering about in a daze with his absurd heart dragging behind him on a chain, this posturing fool, this poseur, was digging up their buried secrets every chance he got.

First he had done it in Moscow, long before he'd gone to Spain, in Dzerzhinsky Square itself. Little nighttime trips to the files. What's old what's-his-face doing lately? This? Hmm. That? My, my. The other thing? Dear me. We'll just write that down, in a private little code of our own, and make it into a word, and remember that word.

And one could remember, once they were set into meter and rhyme, a thousand words. […] One by one, he'd worked his way through the camp NKVD, looking for the right one, the one in whom a spark of ambition still glowed. And, at last, found him. I am, he'd said, a writer of reports. The old trick had worked again, just as it had back in Moscow. He couldn't fly a damned crane to save his soul but when they needed drivel, and they needed drivel, he was their boy. Fair-haired.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Give us Myagin's murderer, Khristo.”

“First the girl.”

Ilya gestured no and closed his eyes for a moment. “Please,” he said gently.

“Omaraeff,” Khristo said.

“Who is he?”

“The headwaiter at Brasserie Heininger. A Bulgarian.”

“For God's sake, why?”

“I don't know. Patriotism, perhaps. There is a chance the British are involved.”

“And you? Are you involved?”

“Marginally, Ilya. I did a small favor, then I walked away from it.”

“You didn't like the plan?”

“No, Ilya, no. I had something. For the first time in my life, just living like a plain man. Working at a job. Coming home to a woman. Nothing I did mattered at all. It was a joy, Ilya. Incomprehensibly a joy.”

“I am sorry.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Khristo looked hesitant. Ozunov laughed at his discomfort. “Yes, boy, I cheated you. I moved a piece while you were daydreaming out the window, enchanted by our Russian snow. I acknowledge it!”

“But why, comrade Major? You could have won without that.”

“Yes, I could have. You do some things well, comrade student, but you play chess like a barbarian. I wanted merely to teach you something, that is my job now.”

“Teach me what, comrade Major?”

Ozunov sighed. “I am told Lenin once called it the Bolshevik Variation, simply another strategy, like the Sicilian Defense. It has two parts to it. The first is this: win at all cost. Do anything you have to do, anything, but win. There are no rules.”

Khristo hesitated. He had a response to this, but it was very bold and he was not sure of himself. At last, he took the leap.

“I have learned what you wanted to teach me, comrade Major,” he said, opening his hand to show Ozunov the white pawn he had stolen when the telephone rang.

“You're a good student,” Ozunov said. “Now learn the second part of the Variation: make the opponent play your game. And the more he despises your methods, the more you must make him use them. The more he arms himself with virtue, the more you must make him fight in the dirt. Then you have him.”

He gestured with his pipe toward the white pawn lying on Khristo's palm. “Keep that,” he said. “A student prize from Ozunov. You have won the copy of Vladimir Ilyich's speeches, now you will have something to remind you, in times to come, how to turn them into prophecies.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Ineptitude could be, he knew, an effective mask for intentions of great subtlety. He feared that something was gathering around him, strand by delicate strand, and that, when its presence was at last manifest, it would be one instant too late to run for freedom.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“He wanted to go to the bookstore where he had met Aleksandra, and he wanted to go alone, so he lost the cars by taking the Métro for two stops. That left him with Bullet-head and a fat-faced man in the Moscow version of a business suit. They stayed with him as he wandered around the back of the Fifth—the university quarter—among students hurrying to early class at the various facultés of the Sorbonne scattered through the district. He entered one of the classroom buildings and moved through the corridors and up and down the staircases in a tight press of humanity. When he finally left the building, Fat-face was gone. Perhaps he had given the whole thing up, Khristo thought, humiliated by student derision at his colossal suit, and defected to the registrar. Khristo glanced behind him—not even deigning to use the standard shop-window-as-mirror—and saw that Bullet-head was sweating up a storm, the last man left. A passenger got out of a nearby taxi and Khristo waved it down. Then watched through the rear window as the NKVD man ran in frantic circles looking for another. He rode three blocks, paid the driver, and stood back in a doorway as Bullet-head sailed by in his own taxi, terrified, surely, that such an expense would not be approved by his bosses.

[...]

He watched the clerks in their blue smocks, moving about the store. How had Aleksandra fitted into this milieu? Her politics, he knew, were the politics of survival, her own survival. Larger questions were not germane—theories bored her; passions belonged in bed, not on the speaker's platform. Her absence stabbed him suddenly, and he said her name silently and dropped a book back onto a table.

“Captain Markov?”

At that name—his cover in Spain—he froze.

Turned slowly to the source of the voice and found Faye Berns. [...] She took his arm as they crossed the street to a café. The touch, at first, made him feel guilty, as though it desecrated his sorrow, as though it betrayed Aleksandra. But he could not deny its warmth, he could not deny how good it felt.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“Come with me,” Antipin said, “and I will teach you something. I will teach you how to hurt them. Hurt them in ways that they do not begin to understand, hurt them so that they cry for mercy, which, by then, I think you will not grant. Your country has a sickness. We know the sickness well because we were once its victims, and we know how to cure it. We have taught others, we can teach you. You yearn to see the world, to move among men, to do things that matter. I was as you are now. A peasant. I sought the world. Because the alternative was to spend the rest of my life looking up a plowhorse's backside. Come with me, my friend, it is a chance at life. This river goes many places, it does not stop in Vidin.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“They polished that off in short order and ordered two more. “Pauvres!” said the owner from behind the bar, meaning you poor starving things, a fine Parisian irony twinkling in her tight smile. It was her divine right as propriétaire of the café to make fun of them a little—I know why you're so hungry.

To the second breakfast she added, unbidden, two steaming bowls of soup. Last night's, no doubt, and all the better for having aged. When these did not appear on the bill, Khristo began to thank her but she tossed his gratitude away with a flip of the hand. It was her right to feed them, to play a small role in their love affair. These were some of the sacred perquisites of the profession, to be dispensed at her whim.

Aleksandra took his hand on the way back to the room, tugged him off in a new direction just before they reached the door of their building. Steered him to a small park in the neighborhood, but it was too wet to sit down.

When he pointed this out, she accused him of being unromantic. He sighed and went off to a tabac and returned with a newspaper, which he divided and placed on the wet bench. She took his hand again as they sat with the rain misting down on them. “We will certainly catch cold,” he said.

“Lovers don't care about a little rain,” she said.

He turned her face toward him and kissed her on the lips. “I am in love,” he said softly, sliding his arm beneath the sheepskin coat and circling her waist, “but I am getting wet.”

“Some ferocious Bulgar you turned out to be. Whose ancestors rode the steppes.”

“Those were Mongols.”

“Oh? Well then, what did the ferocious Bulgars do?”

“Stayed dry,” he said, “when they could.”.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers

“He waited for her, smoking Gitanes, watching the square of sky in the window turn slowly from blue to dark blue, from hazy lavender at sunset to the color of dusk, and then to night. At first, he expected her to return, and waited. Later, for a time, he hoped for it. [...] He looked at his hands, knew for a certainty that if he had a gun he would kill himself. She was lost, he knew; he had lost her, he would not see her again. He lay down on the bed, on his side, and drew his knees up to his chest and pressed his fingers hard against the sides of his head to stop the pain behind his eyes, but that didn't work.

[...] He willed his mind clear and did the job as he knew it should be done: an inch at a time, starting in a corner and expanding outward and upward in imaginary lines of radiation. He got down on his knees, the lamp by his side wherever the cord would reach an outlet.

He found it an hour later. There was old wainscoting by the door, poor-quality wood with the varnish flaking off, and as he moved the lamp the shift of angle in the light revealed the marks. He moved his fingers across the wood, confirming what he saw. She had, after all, left him a message. He sat down heavily and cried into his hands for a long time. He didn't want anyone to hear him. Time and again he touched the wall, traced, with agonizing slowness, the faintly marked outlines of the four scratches her fingernails had made as she'd been taken through the door.”
― Alan Furst, Night Soldiers