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David Benioff

CITY OF THIEVES

^{A Novel}

For Amanda & Frankie

and if the City falls but a single man escapes he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile he will be the City

Zbigniew Herbert

At last Schenk thought he understood and began laughing louder. Then suddenly he asked in a serious tone, “Do you think that the Russians are homosexuals?”

“You’ll find out at the end of the war,” I replied.

Curzio Malaparte

Prologue

My grandfather, the knife fighter, killed two Germans before he was eighteen. I don’t remember anyone telling me—it was something I always seemed to know, the way I knew the Yankees wore pinstripes for home games and gray for the road. But I wasn’t born with the knowledge. Who told me? Not my father, who never shared secrets, or my mother, who shied away from mentioning the unpleasant, all things bloody, cancerous, or deformed. Not my grandmother, who knew every folktale from the old country— most of them gruesome; children devoured by wolves and beheaded by witches—but never spoke about the war in my hearing. And certainly not my grandfather himself, the smiling watchman of my earliest memories, the quiet, black-eyed, slender man who held my hand as we crossed the avenues, who sat on a park bench reading his Russian newspaper while I chased pigeons and harassed sugar ants with broken twigs.

In the late nineties, an insurance conglomerate made an offer for my grandparents’ company.

It was, according to everyone, a fair offer, so my grandmother asked them to double it. There must have been a good deal of haggling, but I could have told the conglomerate that haggling with my grandmother was a waste of time. In the end they gave her what she wanted and my grandparents, following tradition, sold their apartment and moved to Florida.

They bought a small house on the Gulf Coast, a flat-roofed masterpiece built in 1949 by an architect who would have become famous if he hadn’t drowned the same year. Stark and majestic in steel and poured concrete, sitting on a solitary bluff overlooking the Gulf, it is not the house you’d imagine for a retired couple, but they didn’t move south to wither in the sun and die. Most days my grandfather sits at his computer, playing chess online with old friends. My grandmother, bored by inactivity within weeks of the move, created a job for herself at a commuter college in Sarasota, teaching Russian literature to tanned students who seem (based on my one classroom visit) constantly alarmed by her profanity, her heavy sarcasm, and her word-perfect memory of Pushkin’s verse.