Dark Star (14 page)

“A
NDRÉ
A
RONOVICH!
O
VER HERE!
”

An urgent female voice, cutting through the uproar of a densely packed crowd in the living room of an apartment in the Mochovaya district. Szara peered through the smoke and saw a hand waving at him. “Pardon,” he said. “So sorry. Excuse me.” He chose an indirect route toward the hand and voice, swinging wide to avoid the dangerous elbows of those who had managed to break through to the buffet. Moscow was ravaged by shortages of nearly everything, but here there was black Servuga, grilled lamb, pirozhki, salted peas, stacks of warm blini, and platters of smoked salmon. What you had, then, was desperation: a roomful of
apparatchiks,
mandarins of agriculture and road planning, timber and foreign policy, as well as the security services, trying to feed themselves for the week to come. More than one pocket was stuffed with meat, smoked fish, even butter—whatever one could swipe.

For an instant, Szara caught sight of a vaguely familiar face that appeared over the shoulder of a naval officer, then vanished in the crowd. A sophisticated woman, lightly made up, with simple but stylishly managed hair and dangling silver earrings.

He figured it out just about the time they found each other: a curiously altered Renate Braun, wearing a full blouse of lime-colored silk and the modestly coquettish smile one saw in British films of cocktail parties. “Heavens, what a crowd!” she said, brushing his cheek with hers—a dear friend one simply doesn't see often enough. Last seen slicing up a dead man's pants cuffs with a razor blade in an Ostend whorehouse, here was an entirely different version of the woman.

“You must meet Mr. Herbert Hull,” she gushed, speaking in German-accented English.

Now Szara noticed that she had in tow a tall, sandy-haired man with a weather-beaten face and wildly overgrown eyebrows. He was perhaps in his late forties and, from his casual, loose-jointed posture, evidently American. He was smoking, with difficulty, a poorly rolled
makhorka
cigarette, a self-conscious attempt to be part of the local scenery, Szara thought. “Herb Hull,” he said. He had a powerful grip and sought something in Szara's eyes when they shook hands.

“Herb has been so anxious to meet you,” Renate Braun said.

“We all know André Szara,” Hull said. “I'm a great fan of your work, Mr. Szara.”

“Oh but you must call him André.”

“Yes. Please.”

Szara's English was at best uncertain. He was going to sound awful, hesitant and somehow importunate—an impression often created when Slavs spoke English. He already felt a hatefully ingratiating smile creeping over his face.

“Herb's an editor with a new American magazine. A very important undertaking. You'll know him, of course, from when he was with the
Nation
and the
New Republic.”

“Ah yes.” Szara knew the names, prayed he wouldn't be questioned about specific articles. The anxious smile grew. “Of course. Importantly.”

Szara saw Renate Braun wince, but plunged ahead. “You are liking Russia?”

“Never the same place two days in a row, things go wrong, but there's a strength in the people that's irresistible.”

“Ach!”—mock horror from Renate Braun—“he knows us too well.”

Hull smiled and shrugged. “Trying to learn, at any rate. That's what we need. Firsthand knowledge, a feel for the real Russia.”

“I am certain that André can help you with that, Herb. Positive.”

“Yes?” Szara said.

“Why not?” Hull's eyebrows rose. “After all, I'm an editor, you're a writer. For a new magazine, well, a Russian writer speaking about the USSR would be a change, change for the better I'm inclined to think. No?”

“Ah, but my English.”

“No problem, André. We'd be happy to do the translation, or it could be done here. Won't be perfect, but we'll guarantee to preserve the sense of it.”

“I am honored,” Szara said. He was. The thought of appearing in a respected journal before an American audience, not the usual
Daily Worker
crowd, was immensely pleasing. Ilya Ehrenburg,
Pravda's
number one correspondent, had done it, occupying the journalistic territory in the Spanish Civil War so effectively that Szara was virtually restricted to other parts of Europe.

Hull let the offer sink in, then went on. “Renate tells me you're working on a historical piece that might be right up our alley. I won't kid you, running something like that would get us the attention we need. And we'll pay for it. Won't be Hollywood, of course, but I think you'll find us competitive in the New York market.”

Renate Braun seemed quite excited by the prospect. “We've even discussed a title, André Aronovich.”

Szara stared at her. What was she talking about?

“Just discussed,” Hull broke in. He knew what a certain look on a writer's face meant. “Working title is all it is, but I can tell you it caught my attention.”

“Title?”

Renate Braun said, “The piece must be exciting—our plan fulfillment norms won't do, I suspect. It must have …” She looked at Hull for the word.

“Intrigue?”

“Yes. That's it. Intrigue! A story of Russia's revolutionary past, its secret history. We aren't completely sure what it is you're working on—you writers keep close with ideas—but we thought perhaps something on the order of ‘The Okhrana's Mysterious Man.' ” She turned to Hull. “Yes? It's good English?”

“Yes indeed. Good enough to put on the cover, I'd say.”

Szara repeated the title in Russian. Renate Braun nodded vigorously. “Your English is better than you think, André Aronovich.”

“Of course,” Hull said, “you can always use a pen name if you like, I'm not unaware how easy it is to get into trouble these days. We'd rather have your name, of course, but we'll protect your identity if that makes you more comfortable.”

Szara just stared. How much did this man know? Did he have any idea what happened to people who played such games? Was he brave? Stupid? Both?

“Well, André, would you consider it?” Hull asked, eyes keen, head tilted inquiringly to one side, gauging his quarry.

“How could he not?” Renate Braun said. “Such an opportunity!”

Szara walked for a long time that night. His tiny apartment in Volnitzky Alley wasn't far from the house where the party had been given, so he circled the center of the city, crossing the icebound river, a lone, January figure in fur hat and overcoat. He kept an eye out for
bezprizorniye,
bands of children orphaned by the purge who attacked and robbed solitary walkers of their money and clothing—you might just as easily freeze to death if your head wasn't bashed in—but it was evidently too cold for hunting.

Sooner or later,
he thought,
things fall into place and, often as not, you'd rather they hadn't.
Now the long leash in Prague and Berlin made sense. They were letting him have his time with the dossier, counting on the fact that he'd stick his curious writer's nose
into the business. Seen externally, a well-known journalist had sniffed out a big story which, in the normal way of things, he'd tell the world. They'd protected him when the Georgian
khvost
operatives had him taken off the train, then left him free to work.

And now they were rather casually asking him to commit suicide.

Was it too much to ask? That one life should be sacrificed so that hundreds, perhaps thousands, might survive? All he need do was practice his natural trade. Who was the Okhrana's mysterious man? Well, we know a few small details. A, B, C, and D. A new and provocative enigma from enigmatic Russia. Perhaps, someday, we'll learn his real identity. Yours truly, André Szara. (Please omit flowers.)

Or, oh yes, the pen name.
Boris Ivanov has served in the Soviet diplomatic corps.
That would surely throw the NKVD off the scent. For perhaps a month. Or maybe a year. Not much longer.

Still, it would certainly communicate a point of view:

We know what you did and we can prove it, now stop killing us or we'll finish you. Blackmail. Plain old-fashioned politics. Ancient as time.

He admired the plan, though he felt more than a little chagrin over his apparently boundless capacity for self-deception. Certain things now made sense. On the train to Prague, General Bloch had told him, albeit obliquely, just what they had in mind for him. Szara had triumphantly misunderstood him, of course, taking delicately phrased information to be some sort of pompous philosophy, a homily.

With some difficulty Szara won back from his memory the general's statements: “Some men, in such circumstances, might be careless of their lives. Such men rise to an opportunity. And then we have a hero!” In an empty street coated with gray ice, Szara laughed out loud. Bloch had said something about Szara's attitude toward himself after pointing out, dexterously enough, that he had neither wife nor children. What else? Oh yes. “To be a writer requires work and sacrifice, to follow any road wherever it may lead.”

Yes. Well. Now one knew where it led. Just as one knew in 1917 when one was twenty and what did death matter. From the beginning,
in the park in Ostend, Szara had sensed his fate. He'd dodged a time or two, yet here it was, back again. The Szara that Bloch found on the train was, like his revolutionary brethren, a dead man on furlough, a furlough now coming to its inevitable conclusion, as all furloughs must.

Suddenly, the walls of his irony collapsed and real anguish struck his heart. He stopped cold, his face twisted with pain and anger; a sob rose to the base of his throat and stuck there—he had to bite his lip to keep from howling the dreaded question directly at God and the streets of Moscow:

Why now?

Because
now
everything was different. Bloch had met a certain kind of man on the train to Prague but
now
he was not that man. He was instead that man who presses his face against the skin of a woman to inhale such fragrance as makes him want to cry out with joy. He was that man who spins between tenderness and raging lust like a helpless top, who wakes up on fire every morning, who spends his hours thinking of only one thing—yet how brilliantly he thinks of it!

He recovered. Regained himself, breathed deeply, resumed walking. The wall inside him must not be breached: it kept in, it kept out. He had to have it to survive.

He realized that the frost had stolen the feeling from his face and he turned toward home, walking quickly. Later he scalded his mouth with tea while sitting in his overcoat and fur hat at the table his wife, only a few months before she died, had insisted he put by the kitchen window. It had been a lovely table, an absurdly ornamental cherrywood thing with heavy, scrollworked legs. Using it in the kitchen they'd ruined it, of course. Now it was a place to watch the white dawn come up over the chimneys of Moscow, thin smoke standing motionless in the dead, frozen air.

Szara's interrogation—a form of debriefing for those cooperating with the special services—was the province of his official “friend” in Moscow, Abramov. Nonetheless, an interrogation. And the fact
that it was supervised by a friend made it, as the
apparat
intended, worse not better—a system that turned friends into hostages held against the subject's honesty. If you lied, and your interrogator believed it, and then they caught you lying, you were both finished: de facto conspirators. Maybe you didn't care to save your own miserable life, but perhaps you'd think twice about murdering a friend.

Szara lied.

Sergei Abramov lived in the higher reaches of the NKVD Foreign Department, a confidant of the godlings Shpigelglas and Sloutsky if not officially their equal. He would arrive at Szara's apartment every day at about eleven with egg sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, a paper sack of tea, sometimes vodka, occasionally little almond cakes with a sticky coating of honey that had you licking your fingers while you answered questions. He was a thickset, bulky man, handsome in his bulk, in a much-worn blue pinstripe suit, the jacket buttoned across his belly over a rippling vest with a gold watch chain stretched from pocket to pocket. Abramov had sharp eyes that caught the light, a broken nose, a black homburg that he never removed, and a full black beard that gave him the air of a successful operatic baritone—an artist used to getting his own way and certain to create havoc if he didn't. He would sit on a kitchen chair with his knees apart, place a cigarette between his lips, light it with a long, wooden match, then half close his eyes as he listened to you, apparently on the verge of sleep. Often he made a small noise, a grunt that might mean all sorts of things: sympathy—
what a time you've had of it
—or disbelief, perhaps an acknowledgment that what you said was true, perhaps the groan of a man too often deceived. It was in fact a stratagem, meant nothing, and Szara knew it.

Abramov spoke in a low, hoarse rumble, a voice rich with sorrow at having found all humankind to be the most absurd collection of liars and rogues. Posing a question, his face was filled with gloom. Like a teacher who knows his hopeless pupils will offer only wrong answers, Abramov was an interrogator whose subjects never told the truth. The method was ingenious. Szara understood and admired it but nevertheless felt the powerful undertow it created: he
found himself wanting to please Abramov, to offer such resoundingly honest statements that the man's sour view of the world would be swept away by idealism reborn.