Night Soldiers by Alan Furst

Author:Alan Furst
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Mystery, Suspense, Historical, Thriller, War
ISBN: 9780375760006
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Published: 1987-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

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. The hour for him to go to work passed unnoticed. He paced the room, moving from the battered armoire that served as their closet to the open window. He would pause there and look out, sometimes seeing, sometimes not. The shops were closed, their metal shutters pulled down. A few people hurried along the sidewalk, one or two cars went by. Sunday night, and everyone was locked up in their apartments, hiding from whatever it was they hid from on a Sunday night. He could smell potatoes frying and the damp scents of the Paris street. It was so quiet that sounds of clinking plates and bits of conversation—once a laugh—floated up to him. Then he would turn away from the window, move to the foot of the bed and back across to the armoire. At one point he opened it, found all her clothing in place, including the white Marlene Dietrich trenchcoat—a fashion necessity that spring in the city—her pride and joy. But it had been warmish in the afternoon, she could have worn only a sweater. In the drawer of the night table she kept a box of small things she believed to be valuable. Bits and pieces. A silver button, an American coin, a cameo of Empress Josephine from a souvenir shop. Her perfume was heavy on the treasures, as though she had once kept the bottle among them. On one of his trips past the small mirror, he discovered a red, angry mark on the skin beside his eye, realized it hurt, realized he had put it there himself. 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.

Later, he woke up with a gasp, dizzy and lost, and felt the weight of sorrow return to him. Discovered the side of his face was wet. He forced himself off the bed and started searching the room, but he missed it on the first search, found nothing out of the ordinary. A ten-franc note hidden in a shoe, that was all. At 1:30 in the morning he opened the door and listened for a long time at Dodin's room down the hall, heard only silence. He kicked the door open, went over the room slowly and carefully, as he'd been taught, but there was nothing there at all, only dustballs beneath the bed.

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