City of Thieves Read Online Free

the four of us squatting on our haunches around the fallen pilot, sipping the liquor that might have been cognac or brandy or Armagnac. None of us knew the difference. Whatever it was, the stuff was warmth in the belly.
    Vera stared at the German’s face. Her expression held no pity, no fear, only curiosity and contempt—the invader had come to drop his bombs on our city and instead had dropped himself. We hadn’t shot him down, but we felt triumphant anyway. No one else in the Kirov had come across an enemy’s corpse. We would be the talk of the apartment bloc in the morning.
    “How do you think he died?” she asked. No bullet wounds blemished the body, no singed hair or leather, no sign of any violence at all. His skin was far too white for the living, but nothing had pierced it.
    “He froze to death,” I told them. I said it with authority because I knew it was true and I had no way to prove it. The pilot had bailed out thousands of feet above nighttime Leningrad. The air at ground level was too cold for the clothes he was wearing—up in the clouds, outside of his warm cockpit, he never had a chance.
    Grisha raised the flask in salute. “Here’s to the cold.”
    The flask began to circle again. It never got to me. We should have heard the car’s engine from two blocks away, the city after curfew was quiet as the moon, but we were busy drinking our German liquor, making our toasts. Only when the GAZ turned onto Voinova Street, heavy tires rattling on the asphalt, headlights stabbing toward us, did we realize the danger. The punishment for violating curfew without a permit was summary execution. The punishment for abandoning a firefighting detail was summary execution. The punishment for looting was summary execution. The courts no longer operated; the police officers were on the front lines, the prisons half full and dwindling fast. Who had food for an enemy of the state? If you broke the law and you were caught, you were dead. There wasn’t time for any legal niceties.
    So we ran. We knew the Kirov better than anyone. Once we got inside the courtyard gates and into the chilled darkness of the sprawling building, no one could find us if they had three months to search. We could hear the soldiers shouting at us to stop, but that didn’t matter; voices didn’t frighten us, only bullets made a difference and no one had pulled a trigger yet. Grisha made it to the gate first—he was the closest thing to an athlete among us—he leaped onto the iron bars and hoisted himself upward. Oleg was right behind him and I was behind Oleg. Our bodies were weak, muscles shrunken from lack of protein, but fear helped us scale the gate as quickly as we ever had.
    Near the top of the gate I looked back and saw that Vera had slipped on a patch of ice. She stared up at me, her eyes round and fearful, on her hands and knees as the GAZ braked beside the body of the German pilot and four soldiers stepped out. They were twenty feet away, their rifles in their hands, but I still had time to pull myself over the gate and disappear into the Kirov.
    I wish I could tell you that the thought of deserting Vera never entered my mind, that my friend was in danger and I went to her rescue without hesitation. Truly, though, at that moment I hated her. I hated her for being clumsy at the worst possible time, for staring up at me with her panicked brown eyes, electing me to be her savior even though Grisha was the only one she had ever kissed. I knew that I could not live with the memory of those eyes pleading for me, and she knew it, too, and I hated her even as I jumped down from the gate, lifted her to her feet, and hauled her to the iron bars. I was weak, but Vera couldn’t have weighed forty kilos. I boosted her onto the gate as the soldiers shouted and their boot heels slapped on the pavement and the bolts of their rifles snapped into place.
    Vera went over the top and I scrambled up behind her, ignoring the soldiers. If I stopped, they