Finally – it seemed like forever – he was still.
Solange walked away through the crowd.
She heard a man’s voice say, “He was a hero.”
“What?”
It was Patrice Reynaud, a railway conductor who had been a friend of Louis. Patrice kept walking, but repeated, “He was a hero, your Louis.”
“Your Louis,” Solange thought. If only I had let him be my Louis.
That night she walked over to La Maison de Madame Sette and went into the woman’s little office.
“I am ready to begin work,” she said.
Madame looked at her skeptically. “Why now, chérie?”
“Why not now, madame?” Solange answered. “Why delay the reality of life?”
“Your mother will not like it.”
Marie didn’t. She yelled, she lectured, she wept. “I didn’t want this kind of life for you. I wanted something better for you.”
So did I, Solange thought.
Life decided otherwise.
Madame Sette, of course, was delighted and decided to make an event of it. She spent an entire week promoting the auctioning off of Solange’s virginity. The girl would fetch a very high price.
“I will give you half,” Madame told her. “That is more than I usually give.”
“Half is fine,” Solange answered.
Put it away, don’t squander it, Madame advised her. Put your savings in the bank, work hard, and someday you can open up a little shop of your own. A woman should have her own money in this world, her own business.
“Yes, madame.”
The big night arrived, and the parlor was packed with German officers. Most of the local Frenchmen would have nothing to do with this, and those that would had been intimidated by word from the Resistance that it would not treat gently any man who bid for the virtue of a martyr’s girl.
Solange let Madame dress her for the occasion.
A crude mockery of wedding garb, the white diaphanous gown concealed little, her white lace headpiece was set gently on her hair that fell freely and shining down her back, adding to the image of virginity. Her makeup was slight and subtle, a little pencil to widen her already beautiful eyes, and just a shade of blush appropriate to a young bride.
Solange felt disgust.
Disgust when Madame insisted on examining her to verify her purity, disgust when she was being dressed up for the ceremonial travesty, disgust as she sat in the “bridal suite” and prepared herself for the event, disgust when she was led into the room, which fell instantly silent as men swallowed their lust. Disgust when Madame started the bidding high and it quickly went higher as the men were willing to spend small fortunes to have what they saw beneath the wedding gown.
Hoeger sat silent, his position and authority speaking for him. He let the bidding rise to an unprecedented height, then lifted the index finger of his right hand. The bidding stopped right there. No one, certainly not his subordinate officers, had the nerve to outbid the commander of the city’s Gestapo.
Madame quickly counted three and closed the bidding.
Hoeger took Solange by the arm and led her down the hallway to the “bridal suite.” He stripped off the dress, threw her down on the bed, and took her.
Solange moaned. She groaned in pleasure, called him her man, told him to do it harder, told him it was wonderful, he was wonderful. Said if she only knew, she would have let him before, let him anytime. She bucked and tensed, screamed as she came.
“You beautiful creature,” he panted. “I had no idea.”
She sighed. “So much pleasure.”
He closed his eyes, went back at it, intent on his own pleasure.
She reached under the mattress for the knife that Reynaud had given her, brought it up, and slashed his throat.
The Resistance got her out of the brothel and hid her in the back of a produce truck, then in a small cellar in the slums of Marseille. She was in the tight, dark space for three weeks and thought she might lose her mind before they finally took her out and up into the air, into the light. She still had nightmares.
There was plenty of work for her there, in the brothels frequented by the Germans. Her job was to listen, to pick up bits and pieces, and as a result trains were derailed, messages intercepted, Resistance fighters escaped just before the Gestapo came for them. And if one of the officers was gunned down at his favorite café or outside of his mistress’s place – all the better.
Solange never went home.
In the hungry winter of 1946, she returned to the only work she knew, becoming the mistress of an American officer. When he was rotated home, she found another, then another. This last one begged to marry her and take her back to Texas, but she told him not to be so foolish.
Shortly after, she met an OSS officer who said that they might have use for a woman like her.
With that, Solange finished her story.
Nicholai held her close until she finally fell asleep.
11
IN THE MORNING, Nicholai summoned Haverford and demanded to know the identity of the person he was meant to terminate. “As I’m a target now myself,” Nicholai said over coffee and croissant, “I think I have the right to know.”
Solange left the house earlier to buy groceries.
Haverford listened, seemed to seek a response in the milk swirling around in his cup, then looked up and answered, “You’re right. It’s time.”
“So?”
“The Soviet commissioner to Red China,” Haverford said. “Yuri Voroshenin.”
The name hit Nicholai like a hard slap, but – and perhaps only thanks to the minor paralysis of his facial muscles – he managed to keep his expression placid as he feigned a lack of recognition and asked, “Why eliminate him?”
“Korea,” Haverford answered.
Egged on by the Soviets, the madman Kim had invaded South Korea and the United States was forced to intervene. When MacArthur’s counterattack pushed to the Yalu River near the border with China, Mao felt that his hand had been forced and sent three hundred thousand troops into Korea.
The United States and China were at war. Worse, the conflict isolated China from the West and forced it to accept Soviet hegemony, thereby creating a solid Communist bloc from the Elbe to the shores of the Pacific.
“We have to drive a wedge between Beijing and Moscow,” Haverford concluded.
“By assassinating this Voroshenin?” Nicholai asked. “What good will that do?”
“We’ll hand the Russians sufficient evidence to blame the Chinese,” Haverford explained. “The Chinese will, of course, know that they didn’t do it, and conclude that the Soviets sacrificed one of their own in order to blame the Chinese and demand further concessions – perhaps permanent bases in Manchuria.”
It’s a classic Go ploy, Nicholai thought, to sacrifice a line of stones to lure your enemy into a misapprehension of your strategy. Uncharacteristic of Americans, who reveled in the childlike game of checkers. A deeper mind was behind this maneuver. It could be Haverford, but certainly he lacked the position to authorize a killing at this high level.
Who is it, then? Nicholai wondered.
Who is this Go player?
“Tell me about Voroshenin,” he said.
12
“DISABUSE YOURSELF of the notion that we’re sending you to murder some innocent diplomat,” Haverford told Nicholai.
Yuri Andreovitch Voroshenin was a high-ranking member of the KGB, a fact that the Chinese knew and deeply resented.
“Above all else,” Haverford warned, “our boy Yuri is a survivor.”
He laid out what the CIA knew about Yuri Voroshenin.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1898, the son of a schoolteacher, Voroshenin was a committed revolutionary even as a boy. By the time he was fifteen he had spent time in three Tsarist jails, at seventeen he barely escaped a traitor’s noose and was exiled to Siberia. The Bolsheviks ordered him to join the army in 1914, and he surfaced as a leader of the 1916 mutiny that sent soldiers streaming home from the front.