Classic Spy Novels 3-Book Bundle
Read Classic Spy Novels 3-Book Bundle Online
Authors: Alan Furst
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Espionage, #Historical
Night Soldiers, The World at Night
, and
Kingdom of Shadows
are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Random House eBook Edition
Night Soldiers
copyright © 1988 by Alan Furst
The World at Night
copyright © 1996 by Alan Furst
Kingdom of Shadows
copyright © 2000 by Alan Furst
Excerpt from
Mission to Paris
copyright © 2012 by Alan Furst
All Rights Reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The novels contained in this omnibus were each published separately by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1988, 1996, and 2000.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book
Mission to Paris
by Alan Furst. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
Cover design: Anna Bauer
Cover image: Superstock
eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-8417-0
v3.1_r1
Contents
Praise for Alan Furst and
Night Soldiers
“Intelligent, ambitious, absorbing … The history is deftly incorporated; the viewpoint civilized; the characters and the settings picturesque; the adventures exciting; the writing pungent.”
—WALTER GOODMAN, The New York Times
“Night Soldiers has everything the best thrillers offer—excitement, intrigue, romance—plus grown-up writing, characters that matter, and a crisp, carefully researched portrait of the period in which our own postwar world was shaped.”
—GEOFFREY WARD, USA Today
“A novel elevated above the spy genre by … Furst’s well-written description of an era that turned millions of people into driftwood tossed about on the sea of history.”
—HERBERT SUNDVALL, The Seattle Times
“Night Soldiers is an atmospheric journey through turbulent lands at a turbulent time, not so much a thriller as it is a panoramic, historical adventure.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Intelligent and absorbing … An unusual viewpoint, solid research and unobtrusively elegant writing make this pure pleasure to read.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Evocative, moving … Furst shows a remarkable talent, integrating details about the cultures of Spain, France and Eastern Europe with a fascinating story of the constantly changing, constantly unpredictable events of that world at war.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of the very best novels ever written about the inner world of Soviet intelligence…. This fine novel, in effect the memoir so many did not live to write for themselves, is a triumph of historical imagination.”
—Thomas Powers, author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Alan Furst
Map copyright © 1988 by George Ward
Reader’s guide copyright © 2001, 2002 by Random House, Inc.
R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
T
RADE
P
APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in hardcover by Houghton Mifflin in 1988.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Furst, Alan.
Night soldiers / Alan Furst.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-48881-7
E
UROPE—
H
ISTORY—1918
-1945—Fiction.
W
ORLD
W
AR, 1939
-1945—Europe—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3556.U76 N5 2002
813′.54—dc 21˙˙2002017947
Random House website address:
www.atrandom.com
v3.0
Contents
Levitzky’s Geese
Blue Lantern
Paris, 1937
Plaque Tournant
Bessarabia
Push out a bayonet. If it strikes
fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron,
pull back for another day.
Executive Order 9621
TERMINATION OF THE OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES (OSS)
—V. I. Lenin May 1922
The Secretary of War shall, whenever he deems it compatible with the national interest, discontinue any activity transferred by this paragraph and wind up all affairs relating thereto.
—Harry S. Truman September 20, 1945
I
N
B
ULGARIA, IN 1934, ON A MUDDY STREET IN THE RIVER
town of Vidin, Khristo Stoianev saw his brother kicked to death by fascist militia.
His brother was fifteen, no more than a blameless fool with a big mouth, and in calmer days his foolishness would have been accommodated in the usual ways—a slap in the face for humiliation, a few cold words to chill the blood, and a kick in the backside to send him on his way. That much was tradition. But these were
political
times, and it was very important to think before you spoke. Nikko Stoianev spoke without thinking, and so he died.
On both sides of the river—Romania to the north and Bulgaria to the south—the political passion ran white hot. People talked of little else: in the marketplace, in the church, even—a mark of just how far matters had progressed—in the kitchen.
Something has happened in Bucharest. Something has happened in Sofia
.
Soon, something will happen here
.
And, lately, they marched.
Torchlight parades with singing and stiff-armed salutes. And the most splendid uniforms. The Romanians, who considered themselves much the more stylish and urbane, wore green shirts and red armbands with blue swastikas on a yellow field. They thrust their banners into the air in time with the drum: we are the Guard of Archangel Michael. See our insignia—the blazing crucifix and pistol.
They were pious on behalf of both symbols. In 1933, one of their number had murdered Ion Duca, the prime minister, as he waited for a train at Sinaia railway station. A splinter group, led by a Romanian of Polish descent named Cornelius Codreanu, called itself the Iron Guard. Not to be outdone by his rivals, Codreanu had recently assassinated the prefect of Jassy “because he favored the Jews.” Political times, it seemed, brought the keenest sort of competitive instincts into play and the passionate reached deep within themselves for acts of great magnitude.
The men of Vidin were not quite so fashionable, but that was to be expected. They were, after all, Slavs, who prided themselves on simplicity and honesty, while their brethren across the river were of Latin descent, the inheritors of a corner of the Roman Empire, fancified, indolent fellows who worshiped everything French and indulged themselves in a passion for the barber, the tailor, and the gossip of the cafés. Thus the Bulgarian marchers had selected for themselves a black and olive green uniform which was, compared with Romanian finery, simple and severe.
Still, though simple and severe, they were
uniforms
, and the men of Vidin were yet at some pains, in 1934, to explain to the local population how greatly that altered matters.
It was a soft autumn evening, just after dusk, when Nikko Stoianev called Omar Veiko a dog prick. A white mist hung in the tops of the willows and poplars that lined the bank of the river, clouds of swallows veered back and forth above the town square, the beating of
their wings audible to those below. The Stoianev brothers were on their way home from the baker’s house. Nikko, being the younger, had to carry the bread.
They were lucky to have it. The European continent lay in the ashes of economic ruin. The printing presses of the state treasuries cranked out reams of paper currency—showing wise kings and blissful martyrs—while bankers wept and peasants starved. It was, certainly, never quite so bad as the great famines of Asia. No dead lay bloated in the streets. European starvation was rather more cunning and wore a series of clever masks: death came by drink, by tuberculosis, by the knife, by despair in all its manifestations. In Hamburg, an unemployed railway brakeman took off his clothes, climbed into a barrel of tar, and burned himself to death.