Satori by Don Winslow Page A

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
    I N 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