Blood of Victory Read Online Free PDF

read.”
    “That’s true,” Serebin said. “And they have also taught them to inform on their parents.”
    “There is a last piece of fish,” Madame Della Corvo said. “André, give me your plate.”
    “Stalin is a beast,” Marrano said. “And he’s turned the country into a prison. But they are the only counterweight to Hitler.”
    “Were, you mean,” Della Corvo said. “Until the pact.”
    “That won’t last,” Marrano said. Serebin, watching him in candlelight, thought he looked like a Renaissance assassin. A thin line of beard traced the edge of his jaw from one sideburn to the other, rising to a sharp point at the chin.
    “Is that your view, Ilya?” Della Corvo asked.
    Serebin shrugged. “Two gangsters, one neighborhood, they fight.”
    Anna Della Corvo met his eyes. “The end of Europe, then.”
    “And where,” Marrano said, “will you be when it comes to that?”
    “Wherever the war isn’t.”
    “Oh yes?” Marie-Galante said.
    Serebin persisted. “I’ve seen too many people shot.”
    “In battle?” Marrano said.
    “Afterwards.”
    Across from him, the man called Bastien smiled.
So have I. So what?
    Serebin started to tell him, but Enid said, “There
is
no place to go, monsieur.” She set a small beaded evening bag on the table and hunted through it until she found a cigarette. Marrano took a lighter from his pocket and lit it for her. She exhaled smoke and said, “Nowhere.”
    Della Corvo laughed as he picked up the wine bottle and walked around the table, refilling everyone’s glass, touching each of them, his manner affectionate and teasing. “Oh, have a little more. ‘Live today,’ you know, et cetera, et cetera.”
    Anna Della Corvo leaned toward Serebin and said, for him and not for the others, “Please understand, we are all exiles here.”
    “Do you know,” Della Corvo said as he returned to his chair, “that I am a great admirer of
La Torre Argèntea
?”
    What the hell was that?
    “You’re surprised. Not your personal favorite, perhaps.”
    Oh Jesus he meant
The Silver Tower
. Serebin’s first book, which he’d obviously read in the Italian edition. “Well,” Serebin said, pretending that he’d been thinking it over. He then realized that given the pause for speculation, he was obliged to say something meaningful. “I was twenty-eight.”
    “Should that matter?” Della Corvo raised an eyebrow as he said it, would, in a minute, have the whole pack of them howling at his heels.
In a midnight blizzard, wolves chase the troika.
    “It’s only that I might have done those stories better, ten years later.”
    “What would be different? You don’t mind my asking, do you?”
    “No, no, it’s fine. I suppose, now, I might call it
Kovalevsky’s Tower.
Silver was how it looked in the heat of summer, but a man named Kovalevsky built it.” He paused a moment, then explained. “A stone tower on a cliff above the Black Sea, near Odessa.”
    “Why?”
    “Did he build it?”
    “Yes.”
    “He had no reason. Or, his reason was,
I want to build a stone tower
. And we used to say, ‘It’s a landmark for people lost at sea.’ Which it was, for sailors, but we meant a little more than that. Maybe. I don’t know.”
    Anna Della Corvo laughed. “My love,” she said to her husband, and at that moment she utterly adored him, “people don’t know why they do things.”
    “Sometimes in books,” Serebin said, laughing along with her.
    Madame Della Corvo rang a crystal bell and a waiter appeared with bowls of fruit on a silver tray. There was another bottle of wine, and another.
    Green bottles with no label. “It’s Médoc,” she explained, “from a
cru classé
estate. We buy it from a ship’s chandler in Sète.”
    Were they often in France?
    “Oh, now and then. Not recently.”
    Obliquity—the base element of life in a police state, learn it or die. Serebin had learned it in the Russian school. “So then, are you going back to Italy?”
    “Well, we