Dark Star
Praise for Alan Furst and
Dark Star
“The time-frame of the late 1930s on the Continent was once the special property of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene; Furst has ventured into their fictional territory and brought out a story that is equally original and engaging.”
—Herbert Mitgang,
The New York Times
“Dark Star
is as fine an evocation of prewar Europe as anything I've ever read. An extremely well written and literate novel that practically creates a new genre: historical espionage.”
—Nelson DeMille, author of
The Gold Coast
“Outclasses any spy novel I have ever read.”
—Richard Condon, author of
The Manchurian Candidate
“Captures the murky allegiances and moral ambiguity of Europe on the brink of war…. Nothing can be like watching
Casablanca
for the first time. But Furst comes closer than anyone has in years.”
—Walter Shapiro,
Time
“
[Dark Star]
explores the ambiguous moral ground familiar to readers of Graham Greene, Robert Stone, and le Carré…. Terrific stuff—poignant, moving, provocative.”
—Adam Woog,
The Seattle Times
“Gripping … [Furst's] details of the period … give the book a forceful— and sometimes terrifying—reality.”
—
New York Newsday
“A page-churner of the best sort … Brilliant detail and sure sweep … Here is a thriller more deeply satisfying than much of the nonthrilling ‘serious fiction' around today.”
—
New York Newsday
“One of the best spy novels I've read in years…. The novel is impeccably researched. It's as much historical fiction as it is spy fiction, and the atmosphere of danger and doom it creates by means of deftly employed historical details is matched only by the vividness of its mostly fictional characters.
Dark Star
doesn't merely evoke the period. Because of its engaging plot and appealing hero, it makes you live there, suffer there, and hope.”
—Alan Cheuse,
All Things Considered
“Kafka, Dostoyevsky, and le Carré sit up all night and talk to each other and this is what you get. It is absolutely wonderful.”
—
Kirkus Reviews
“Intelligent, provocative, and gripping … Beautifully and compellingly told.”
—
Publishers Weekly
ALAN FURST is widely recognized as the master of the historical spy novel. He is the author of
Night Soldiers, The Polish Officer, The World at Night, Red Gold, Kingdom of Shadows, Blood of Victory, Dark Voyage,
and
The Foreign Correspondent,
and his novels have been translated into fifteen languages. Born in New York, he has lived for long periods in France, especially Paris. He now lives on Long Island, New York.
Visit the author's website at
www.alanfurst.net
ALSO BY ALAN FURST
Night Soldiers
The Polish Officer
The World at Night
Red Gold
Kingdom of Shadows
Blood of Victory
Dark Voyage
The Foreign Correspondent
“You may not be interested in war,
but war is interested in you.”
—Lev Bronshtein,
known as Leon Trotsky
June 1919
I
N THE LATE AUTUMN OF 1937, IN THE STEADY BEAT OF
North Sea rain that comes with dawn in that season, the tramp freighter
Nicaea
stood at anchor off the Belgian city of Ostend. In the distance, a berthing tug made slow progress through the harbor swell, the rhythm of its engine distinct over the water, its amber running lights twin blurs in the darkness.
The
Nicaea,
6,320 gross tonnes, of Maltese registry, had spent her first thirty years as a coastal steamer in the eastern Mediterranean, hauling every imaginable cargo from Latakia to Famagusta, back to Iskenderun, down to Beirut, north to Smyrna, then south to Sidon and Jaffa—thirty years of blistering summers and drizzling winters, trading and smuggling in equal proportion, occasionally enriching, more typically ruining, a succession of owner syndicates as she herself was slowly ruined by salt, rust, and a long line of engineers whose enthusiasm far exceeded their skill. Now,
in her final years, she was chartered to Exportkhleb, the Soviet Union's grain-trading bureau, and she creaked and groaned sorrowfully to lie at anchor in such cold, northern seas.
Riding low in the water, she bore her cargo gracelessly— principally Anatolian wheat bound for the Black Sea port of Odessa, a city that had not seen imported grains for more than a century. She carried, as well, several small consignments: flaxseed loaded in Istanbul, dried figs from Limassol, a steel drum of Ammonal—a mining explosive made of TNT and powdered aluminum—en route to a sabotage cell in Hamburg, a metal trunk of engineering blueprints for an Italian submarine torpedo, deftly copied at a naval research station in Brindisi, and two passengers: a senior Comintern official using a Dutch passport with the alias Van Doorn, and a foreign correspondent of the newspaper
Pravda
traveling under his true name, André Szara.
Szara, hands thrust deep in pockets, hair blown about by the offshore gale, stood in the shelter of a passageway and silently cursed the Belgian tug captain who, from the methodical chug of the engine, was taking his own sweet time attending to the
Nicaea.
Szara knew harbormen in this part of the world; stolid, reflective pipe smokers who were never far from the coffeepot and the evening paper. Unshakable in crisis, they spent the rest of their days making the world wait on their pleasure. Szara shifted his weight with the roll of the ship, turned his back to the wind, and lit a cigarette.
He had boarded the freighter nineteen days earlier, in Piraeus, having been assigned a story on
the struggle of the Belgian dock-workers.
That was one assignment; there was another. Killing time in a dockside tavern as the
Nicaea
was eased into moorage, he had been approached by the World's Plainest Man. Where, he wondered, did they find them? Russia marked people: deformed most, made some exquisite, at the very least burned itself deep into the eyes. But not this one. His mother was water, his father a wall. “A small favor,” said the world's plainest man. “You'll have a fellow passenger, he is traveling on Comintern business. Perhaps you will find out where he is stopping in Ostend.”
“If I can,” Szara had said. The word
if
could not really be used between them, but Szara pretended it could be and the NKVD
operative—or GRU or whatever he was—graciously conceded his right to suggest he had a choice in the matter. Szara, after all, was an important correspondent.
“Yes. If you can,” he'd said. Then added, “Leave us a little note at the desk of your hotel. To Monsieur Brun.”
Szara spelled it, to make sure he'd got it right. Defiance was over for the day.
“Just so,” said the man.
There was ample time to do the small favor; the
Nicaea
had been at sea for nineteen days, an eternity of icy, seawater showers, salt cod for dinner, and the smell of coal fumes from the freighter's rusting stack as she butted through the October seas. Squinting through the darkness at the lights of the wallowing tug, Szara ached for something sweet, sugar after salt, a cream cake, rain in a pine forest, a woman's perfume. He had, he thought, been too long at sea. An ironist, he heard the theatrical echo of the phrase and grinned privately.
La mélancolie des paquebots
—that said it better. He'd come across the phrase in Flaubert and it had stayed with him; it was all in those four words, the narrow cabin with a light bulb swaying on a cord, the seaweed reek of harbors, slanting rains, a column of black smoke from a funnel on the horizon.
The ship's bell sounded once. Four-thirty. The tug's amber lights grew brighter.
The Comintern man known as Van Doorn stepped from his cabin carrying a leather valise and joined Szara at the railing. He was swaddled in clothing like a child dressed for a winter day, woolen muffler crossed precisely at his throat, cap set low on his head, overcoat buttoned to the very top. “One hour, eh? And we'll be down the gangplank. What is your view, André Aronovich? ” Van Doorn was, as always, wryly deferential toward “the famous journalist Szara.”
“If the port officer makes no difficulties, I would agree,” Szara said.
“That will not happen. He is
nasch.”
The word meant
ours, we own him,
and the tone suggested Szara's great fortune in having
such iron-fisted types as Van Doorn to watch out for him “in the real world.”
“Well, then …” Szara said, acknowledging superior strength.
