Dark Star (20 page)

The money was not at all a bribe—Sénéschal was motivated by idealism—but rather recognition that a group leader simply hadn't the time to earn much of a living for himself.

Sénéschal rolled down the window of the Renault and lit a cigarette. Szara closed the envelope and checked the signs on corner buildings to see what street they were on—anywhere but the neighborhood
of the rue Delesseux base would serve his purposes. Sénéschal was essentially the cut-out; the people he worked with did not know of Szara's existence, and he himself knew Szara only as “Jean Marc,” had no idea of his true name, where he lived or the location of radios or safe houses. Meetings were arranged at different sites every time, with fallbacks in case one party or the other failed to show up. If the network were closed down, Sénéschal would appear three times at various places, nobody would be there to meet him, and that would be the end of it. The
apparat
could, of course, find him again if they wanted to.

Preparing to disengage, Szara asked, “Anything you want or need?”

Sénéschal shook his head. He seemed to Szara, at that instant, a man perfectly content, doing what he wished to do without reservations, even though he could not safely share this side of his life with anyone. There were moments when Szara suspected that many idealists drawn to communism were at heart people with an appetite for clandestine life.

Szara said, “The
LICHEN
situation remains as before?”
LICHEN
was a prostitute, a dark, striking woman of Basque origin who had fled north from the civil war in Spain. The intention was to use
LICHEN
to entice low-level German staff into compromising situations, but she had yet to produce anything beyond free sexual entertainment for a few Nazi chauffeurs.

“It does. Madame has the clap and will not work.”

“Is she seeing a doctor?”

“Being paid to. Whether she actually does it or not I don't know. Whores do things their own way. The occasional dose gets them vertical for a while, and she really doesn't seem to mind.”

“Anything else? ”

“A message for you was left at my law office. It's in with the reports.”

“For me?”

“It says Jean Marc on the envelope.”

This was unusual, but Szara did not intend to go burrowing for the message in front of Sénéschal. They drove in silence for a time, up the deserted boulevard Beaumarchais past the huge wedding
cake of a building that housed the Winter Circus. Sénéschal flipped his cigarette out the window and yawned. The light changed to red and the Renault rolled to a stop beside an empty taxi. Szara handed over a small slip of paper with the location, time, and date of the next meeting. “Enjoy your weekend,” he said, jumped out of the Renault, and slid neatly into the back of the taxicab, slightly startling the driver. “Turn right,” he said as the light went green, then watched as Sénéschal's car disappeared up the boulevard.

It was a little after three in the morning when Szara slipped into the rue Delesseux house and climbed to the third floor. Kranov was done with his W/T chores for the evening and Szara had the room to himself. First he found the envelope with Jean Marc printed across the front. Inside was a mimeographed square of paper with a drawing of a bearded man in Roman armor, a six-point star on his shield and a dagger held before him. The ticket entitled the bearer to Seat 46 in the basement theater at the Rue Muret Synagogue at seven-thirty in the evening of the eighteenth day of the month of Iyyar, in the year 5698, for the annual Lag b'Omer play performed by the synagogue youth group. The address was deep in the Marais, the Jewish
quartier
of Paris. For those who might need a date according to the Julian calendar, a rather grudging 18 May was written in a lower corner.

Szara tucked it in a pocket—really, what would they think of next. A communication traveling upward from a network operative to a deputy was something he'd never heard of, and he rather thought that Abramov would go a little pale if he found out about it, but he was becoming, over time, quite hardened to exotic manifestations, and he had no intention of permitting himself to brood about this one. He had a ticket to a synagogue youth play, so he'd go to a synagogue youth play.

A thin sheet of paper bearing decrypts from the previous night's Moscow traffic awaited his attention, and this he did find disturbing. The problem wasn't with the
SILO
net—some of the answers to the Directorate's questions were probably in the manila envelope he'd picked up from Sénéschal—but the transmission that concerned
OTTER,
Dr. Baumann, worried him. Moscow wanted him squeezed. Hard. And right away. There was no misreading their intention, even in the dead, attenuated language of decoded cables. At first glance, it seemed as though they wanted to turn Baumann Milling into what the Russians called an
espionage center
—why else show such a profound interest in personnel? Because, if you thought about it a moment, they expected a conflagration. Soviet intelligence officers were not queasy types. Disaster only made them colder—that he'd seen for himself. The Foreign Department of the NKVD—now called the First Chief Directorate—had a hundred windows on Germany. What did they see coming? Whatever it was, they didn't believe that Baumann would survive it.

With some effort he recaptured his mind and forced himself to go to work, emptying the manila envelope on the table. Valais's list of German applications for residence permits presented no problems, he simply recopied it. Sénéschal's material from
ARBOR,
Lötte Huber, was brief and to the point, the lawyer had essentially synthesized what he got and in effect done Szara's job for him: the German Trade Mission was probing the French markets for bauxite (which meant aluminum, which meant airframes), phosphorus (flares, artillery shells, tracer bullets), cadmium (which meant nothing at all to him), and assorted domestic products, notably coffee and chocolate. From
ALTO,
Dolek, he would pass on the revised telephone directory of the attaché's office but would eliminate the major's letter from his sister in Lübeck. For himself, he informed the Directorate that he'd met with the
SILO
group leader, disbursed funds, and learned that
LICHEN
was not functioning due to illness.

Next he tore up the
SILO
originals, burned them in a ceramic ashtray, then walked down the hall and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Almost anyone who came in contact with the espionage world was told the story of the beginner operative who'd been instructed to either burn his papers or tear them into bits and flush them down the toilet. An anxious sort, he'd become confused, crumpled up a large wad of paper and dropped it in the toilet, then put a match to it and watched, aghast, as the flames set the toilet seat on fire.

Back in the W/T office, the big alarm clock by Kranov's work
area said it was four-fifteen in the morning. Szara sat at the table and lit a cigarette; the darkened window hid any change of light, but he could hear a bird start up outside. He thought of the hundreds of operatives all across Europe who had finished with their nightwork, as he had, and now fell prey to the same pre-dawn malaise: useless white energy, a nagging sense of some nameless thing left undone, a mind that refused to disengage. Sleep was out of the question.

He squared up the pad of flimsy paper and began to doodle. The memory of Dolek's handwriting, the enormous letters painfully carved into the paper with successive jerks of the pencil, would not leave his mind. Nor would the substance of the letter, especially the Strength through Joy cruise. His imagination wandered, picturing the sort of German worker who would sail off for Lisbon.

Dearest Schätzchen
—Little Treasure—he wrote.
I wish to invite you on a special outing arranged by my Kraft durch Freude club.

He went on a bit with it, mawkish, blustering, then signed it
Hans.
Changed that to
Hansi.
Then tried
Your Sweet Hansi.
No, too much. Just
Hansi
would do.

What would Marta do if she got such a letter? At first she'd think it was a practical joke, tasteless, upsetting. But what if he crafted it in such a way that he made it clear, to her, who was writing? Odile could drop it in a letter box in Hamburg, that would bypass the postal inspectors who processed all foreign mail. He could address it to her personally and sign with a meaningful alias. She could sail to Lisbon on such a cruise. He had to consider it carefully, a lot could go wrong.

But, in principle, why not?

The evening of 18 May was cool and cloudy, but the basement of the Rue Muret Synagogue was warm enough for the women in the audience to produce scented handkerchiefs from their shiny leather handbags. It was not, Szara discovered, an extremely Orthodox synagogue, nor was it quite as poor as it first seemed. Buried deep in the gloom of a twisting little street in the Marais, the building
seemed to sag in every possible direction, its roofline jagged as though scribbled on paper. But the basement was packed with well-dressed men and women, probably parents of the children in the play, their relatives and friends. The women seemed more French than Jewish, and though Szara had taken the precaution of buying a yarmulke (let the Moscow Directorate reimburse him for
that),
there were one or two men in the audience with uncovered heads. Certain cars parked outside, half on the narrow pavement, indicated to Szara by their license plates that some members of the congregation were now doing well enough to live just outside Paris, but retained a loyalty to the old synagogue on the rue Muret, a street that retained a distinct flavor, and aroma, of its medieval origins.

Szara expected to recognize the occupant of Seat 47 or 45, but the place to his right was more than filled by a bulky matron in diamond rings while to his left, on the aisle, sat a dark, teenage girl in a print dress. He had arrived early, been handed a playbill, and waited patiently for contact. But nobody showed up. Eventually, two droopy curtains creaked apart to reveal ten-year-old Pierre Berger, in cardboard armor, as Bar Kochba, the Jewish rebel of Judea in
A.
D
. 132
, in the act of recruiting his friend Lazar for service against the legions of the Emperor Hadrian.

BAR KOCHBA
(pointing at the roof): Look, Lazar! There, in the east. There it is!

LAZAR:
What do you see, Simon Bar Kochba?

BAR KOCHBA:
I see a star. Brighter than all others. A star out of Jacob.

LAZAR:
As in the Torah? “A star out of Jacob, a scepter out of Israel”?

BAR KOCHBA:
Yes, Lazar. Can you see it? It means we shall free ourselves from the tyrant, Hadrian.

LAZAR:
Always you dream! How can we do this?

BAR KOCHBA:
By our faith, by our wisdom, and by the strength of our right hand. And you, Lazar, shall be my first recruit, but you must pass a test of strength.

LAZAR:
A test?

BAR KOCHBA
: Yes. Do you see that cedar tree over there? You must tear it from the earth to prove you are strong enough to join our rebellion.

As Lazar strode across the stage to a paper cedar pinned to a clothes tree, a grandmother's aside was stilled by a loud “Shhh!” Lazar, a stocky, red-cheeked—the makeup artist had been a little overenthusiastic with the rouge—child in a dark blue tunic, huffed and puffed as he struggled with the clothes tree. Finally, he lifted it high, shook it at Bar Kochba, and laid it carefully on its side.

The play,
A Star out of Jacob,
proceeded as Szara, from his own days at the
cheders
in Kishinev and Odessa, knew it had to. A curious holiday, Lag b'Omer, commemorating a host of events all across the span of Jewish tradition and celebrated in a variety of ways. It was sometimes the Scholars' Festival, recalling the death of Rabbi Akiva's students in an epidemic, or the celebration of the first day of the fall of Manna as described in the Book of Exodus. It was a day when the three-year-old children of Orthodox Jews got their first haircuts or a day of weddings. But in Szara's memory of eastern Poland, it was particularly the day that Jewish children played with weapons. Toy bows and arrows long ago, then, during his own childhood, wooden guns. Szara perfectly remembered the Lag b'Omer rifle that he and his father had carved from the fallen branch of an elm tree. Szara and his friends had chased each other through the mud alleys of their neighborhoods, street fighting, peering around corners and going “Krah, krah” as they fired, a fairly accurate approximation by kids who had heard the real thing.

These children were different, he mused, more sophisticated, miniature Parisians with Parisian names: Pierre Berger, Moïse Franckel, Yves Nachmann, and, standing out sharply from all the others, the stunning Nina Perlemère, as Hannah, inspiring the Bar Kochba rebels when they are reluctant to creep through the underground passages of Jerusalem to attack the legionnaires, sweeping her cardboard sword into the sky and slaying Szara entirely with her courage.

HANNAH:
Let there be no despair. First we will pray, then we will do what we must.

This one, pretty as she was, was the warrior: her lines rang out and produced a scattering of spontaneous applause, causing a Roman centurion in the wings to peer around the curtain through blue-framed eyeglasses. There was a slight disturbance to Szara's left as the dark girl in the print dress moved up the aisle and was replaced by General Yadomir Bloch. He reached over and took Szara's left hand in his right for a moment, then whispered, “Sorry I'm late, we'll talk after the play.” This produced a loud “Shh!” from the row behind them.

Through the dark streets of the Marais, Bloch led him to a Polish restaurant on the second floor of a building propped up by ancient wooden beams braced against the sidewalk. The tiny room was lit by candles, not for atmosphere but—Szara could smell the kerosene they were using for the stove—because there was no electricity in the building. Squinting at the menu written in chalk on the wall, they ordered a half bottle of Polish vodka, bowls of tschav—sorrel soup—a plate of radishes, bread, butter, and coffee.