Blood of Victory Read Online Free

vibrant colors. A brown and black daguerreotype of a steppe.
    On the adjacent wall, a mimeographed schedule for the month of November, which Serebin, for the moment left alone, felt he might as well read. A lecture about wool, a meeting of the stamp club, Turkish lessons, English lessons, meeting for new members—please sign up, memorial service for Shulsky, and a film,
Surprising Ottawa,
to be shown in the basement of the Saint Stanislaus church. Tacked up beside the schedule, underlined clippings, news of the Russian community cut from the IRU Istanbul’s weekly newspaper.
    “Serebin!” Kubalsky, the office manager, hugged him and laughed. “Don’t tell anybody you’re here!”
    Kubalsky took him around the office, introduced him to a bewildering assortment of people, sat him down at a table, pushed aside stacks of newspapers and files, and poured him a glass of tea from an ornate copper samovar.
    “Life’s being good to you?” Serebin said, offering Kubalsky a Sobranie.
    “Not too bad.” Kubalsky had a long, narrow face and deep-set eyes that glittered like black diamonds. Twice, in Berlin, he’d been beaten up as a Jew, which made him laugh, through split lips, because his grandfather had been a Russian Orthodox priest.
    Serebin blew on his tea. Kubalsky, prepared for the worst, drummed his fingers on the table. “So, what brings you to Istanbul?”
    “Truth?”
    “Why not?”
    “I had to get away from Paris.”
    “Oh. Claustrophobia.”
    Serebin nodded.
    “Have you seen Goldbark?”
    “Not yet. How is he?”
    “Crazy as a bedbug. Says he lies awake all night, worrying about money.”
    “Him?”
    “‘I make a fortune,’ he says. ‘Where is it? Where is it?’”
    “Where is it?”
    Kubalsky shrugged. “Thank God for the wife, otherwise he’d make us all crazy.” He tapped cigarette ash into a cracked cup used as an ashtray. “The real problem here, of course, is the politics.”
    Serebin agreed.
    “It’s a zoo. The city’s crawling with spies—Nazis, Hungarians, Zionists, Greeks. The German ambassador, von Papen, is in the papers every day, but so are the British. The Turks are scared. Hitler went through the Balkans like shit through an eel. Now he’s got Bulgaria—maybe he stops there, maybe he doesn’t. The Turks are neutral, officially, but, so far, they’re neutral on our side. Still it’s difficult to navigate. That old business about the Middle East—to walk across a square you have to make three moves.”
    “What if they sign on with Germany?”
    “We run. Again.”
    Serge Kubalsky knew all about that. In 1917, he’d been a successful “boulevard journalist” for one of the St. Petersburg newspapers that lived on gossip and innuendo. Then came revolution, and the husband of the woman he was sleeping with that week rose, overnight, from clerk to commissar. Kubalsky got away with eighty roubles and a canary. Settled in Berlin but couldn’t tolerate the Nazis, so he went to Madrid in 1933. The Republican secret service booted him out in ’36, he went to Lisbon, was hounded by Salazar’s thugs and left in ’37. Tried Switzerland—sorry, no residence card. Sofia the following autumn, wrote the wrong thing about the king, so off to Amsterdam, sneaking in the back door just about the time the Wehrmacht was breaking down the front. “I no longer,” he once told Serebin, “speak any language whatsoever.”
    An old woman with a cane came over to the table, kissed Kubalsky on both cheeks, then disappeared into the other room. Kubalsky finished his cigarette and stood up. “Well,” he said, “you’d better take a look at the finances.” He went to a file cabinet and returned carrying a ledger filled with spidery bookkeeping.
    Serebin ran his finger down the expense column.
Ah, Sanskrit.
But he worked at it, found the stamps, the ink and paper and envelopes, the lifeblood, then came upon an entry for
rent
. “What’s this?” he said.
    “Rental of office