Dark Star (22 page)

New piece of paper.

He'd acquired from the Lisbon port authority the expected arrival date, 10 July, of a Strength through Joy cruise from Hamburg. Figuring from Odile's 19 June courier mission, he saw that Marta could just make it if there was room on the boat. For an hour he worked on the letter. It had to be sincere; she had great respect for honesty of a certain kind, yet he knew he mustn't gush. She would hate that. He tried to be casual,
let's enjoy ourselves,
and romantic,
I do need to be with you,
at the same time. Difficult. Suddenly he sat bolt upright. How on earth could he find a German stamp in Paris? He would have to ask Odile to buy one when she got off the train in Berlin. Should he confide in her? No, better not. He was the deputy director of the net, and this was simply another form of communication with an agent. Even love had become espionage, he thought, or was it just the times he lived in? That aside, when was his meeting with Sénéschal? Where was it? He had it written down somewhere. Where? Good God.

4:20
P.M.
The racetrack at Auteuil. By the rail, facing the entrance to Section D. A well-conceived location for a
treff
—shifting crowds, anonymous faces—except if it was raining, which it was. Szara saw
immediately that he and Sénéschal would wind up standing together, isolated, in the view of thousands of people with sense enough to move into the shelter of the grandstand.

Such tradecraft,
he thought, whistling loudly to catch Sénéschal's attention as he emerged from the entry gate. Silently they climbed to the last row of the grandstand as a few horses splattered mud on each other at the far turn of the oval track.
“Allez
you shithead,” said a dispirited old man in an aisle seat.

Szara was by nature acutely aware of shifts in mood, and he sensed Sénéschal's discomfort right away. The lawyer's tousled hair was soaked, a damp cigarette hung from his lips—nobody liked getting wet, but there was more to it than that. His face was pale and tense, as though something had broken through his insouciant defenses and drained his optimism.

For a time they watched galloping horses, a primitive loudspeaker system crackled and popped, the muffled voice of an excited Frenchman could just barely be made out as he called the race.

“A difficult weekend with Fräulein? ” Szara asked, not unsympathetically. He had a hunch that the romantic trip to Normandy had gone wrong.

A Gallic shrug, then, “No. Not so bad. She gives herself like a woman in love—anything at all to please since nothing between lovers can be wrong. If she feels I'm not sufficiently passionate she gets up to tricks. You're a man, Jean Marc, you know.”

“It can't always be easy,” Szara said. “Humans aren't made of steel, and that includes communists.”

Sénéschal watched eight new horses being led out into the rain.

“Shall we give you a little breathing space? Perhaps a notional journey, something to do with the Foreign Office. The crisis in Greece.”

“Is there one?”

“Usually.”

Sénéschal grunted, not terribly interested. “She wants to get married. Immediately.”

“I can't believe you didn't use a …”

“No. It's not that. She thinks she's to be dismissed from her position, sent back to Germany in disgrace. Last weekend, after we'd
done with all the little shrieks and gasps, there were tears. Floods. She turned bright red and puffed up. It rained like a bastard up there. All weekend the stuff ran down the windows. She bawled, I tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Now, she says, only marriage can keep her in France, with me. As for my job at the Foreign Office and the information she's provided, well, too bad. We will live on love, she says.”

“Did she explain? ”

“She gabbled like a goose. What I can make of it is that her boss, Herr Stollenbauer, is under severe pressure. Lötte spent all last week running around Paris in taxis—and she claims she's frightened of Parisian cab drivers—because no Mission cars were available. She says she hunted through every fancy shop in the city, Fauchon, Vigneau, Rollet, the finest
traiteurs
you see, in search of what she calls Rote Grütze. Do you know what that is? Because I don't.”

“A sort of sweetened sauce. Made of red berries,” Szara said.

“Also, they're trying to rent a house, somewhere just outside Paris. In Suresnes or Maisons-Laffitte, places like that. According to her they're more than willing to pay, but French
propriétaries
take their time, want papers signed, bank guarantees, first this, then that. It's ceremonial, drives the Germans crazy; they just want to wave money about and get what they want. They think the French are venal—they aren't wrong but they don't understand how French people worry about their properties. From her stories I gathered, more or less, that this is what's going on. And the worse it gets, the more Stollenbauer feels the pressure, the more he shouts at her. She isn't used to that, so now the answer is to get married, she'll stay in France, and I suppose tell Stollenbauer off in the bargain.”

“Somebody's
coming to Paris.”
”Evidemment.”

“Somebody with an aide to call up and say, ‘Oh yes, and make sure the man's Rote Grütze sauce is available when he eats his pannküchen.' ”

“Shall one go to the forest and pick red berries?”

To Szara's horror, Sénéschal was not at all sarcastic. “Not to worry,” he said sternly. Sénéschal was clearly in the process of wilting. He was physically brave, Szara knew that for a fact, but the
prospect of daily married life with Huber had unnerved him. Szara spoke with authority: “It's the Frenchwoman of your dreams you'll marry, my friend, and not the Fräulein. Consider that an order.”

The new information was provocative. Szara's old instincts—the journalist happening on a story—were sharply aroused. Suddenly the horses churning through the mud seemed triumphant, images of victory: their nostrils flaring, flanks shining with kicked-up spray. The business with the Rote Grütze sauce was curious, but the search for a safe house, that was truly
interesting.
Trade Missions didn't acquire safe houses. That was embassy business, a job undertaken by resident intelligence officers. But the embassy was being circumvented, which meant a big secret, and a big secret meant a big fish, and guess who happened to be standing there with a net.
Cameras,
he thought,
just every kind of camera.

He made a decision. “Huber won't be fired,” he said. “It's to be quite the opposite. Stollenbauer will be crawling at her feet. And as for you, your only problem will be a woman in triumph, a star of stage, screen, and radio, a princess. Demanding, I think, but not something you can't deal with.”

Fully mobilized, Szara's web of contacts had an answer within days.

An Alsatian
traiteur
was located; a smiling Lötte Huber left his shop trailed by a taxi driver struggling under the weight of two cases of Rote Grütze sauce in special crocks of the Alsatian's own design. He was also prepared to offer weisswurst, jaegerwurst, freshly cured sauerkraut subtly flavored with juniper berries because—and here the rosy-cheeked
traiteur
leaned over the counter and spoke an exquisitely polite German—“a man who favors Rote Grütze will always,
always,
madame, want a hint of juniper in his sauerkraut. This is an appetite for piquancy. And this is an appetite we understand.”

Schau-Wehrli dismissed the house dilemma with an imperious Swiss flick of the hand. Her progressive friends and colleagues at the International Law Institute were sounded out and a suitable property was soon located. It was in Puteaux, a step or two from the city border, a dignified, working-class neighborhood near the
Citroën loading docks on the southwestern curve of the Seine: everywhere a grim, sooty brown, but boxes of flowers stood sentry at all the parlor windows, and the single step up to each doorway was swept before eight every morning. At the far edge of the district sat a three-story, gabled brick residence—the home of a doctor now deceased and the subject of an interminable lawsuit—with a high wall covered in ivy and a massive set of doors bound in ironwork. A bit of a horror, but the ivied wall turned out to hide a large, formal garden. Sheets were removed from the furniture, a crew of maids brought in to freshen up. Terra-cotta pots were placed by the entryway and filled to overflowing with fiery geraniums.

Stollenbauer was, as Szara had predicted, magically relieved of much of his burden. The pending visit still made him nervous, much could go wrong, but at least he now felt he
had some support.
From chubby little Lötte Huber no less! Had he not always said that someday her light would shine? Had he not always sensed the hidden talent and initiative in this woman? She'd been so clever in finding the house—where his pompous assistants had shouted guttural French into the phone, cunning Lötte had taken the feminine approach, spending her very own weekend time wandering about various neighborhoods and inquiring of women in the marketplace if they knew of something to rent, not too much legal folderol required.

Meanwhile, Szara arrayed his forces and played his own office politics. Oh, Goldman was
informed,
he had to be, but the cable was a masterpiece of its genre—
Trade Mission apparently expecting important visitor sometime in near future,
item eight of seventeen items, not a chance under heaven that such a phrase would bring the greedy
rezident
swooping down from Brussels to snaffle up the credit.

Using a copy of the house key, Szara and Sénéschal had a look around for themselves one evening. Szara would have dearly loved to record the proceedings, but it would simply have been too dangerous, requiring a hidden operative running a wire recorder. Then too, important visitors usually had security men in attendance, people with a horror of unexplained ridges under carpets, miscellaneous wires, even fresh paint.

Instead they approached a birdlike little lady, the widow of an artillery corporal, who lived on the top floor of the house across the street and whose parlor window looked out over the garden.
A troublesome affair,
they told her;
a wayward wife, a government minister, the greatest discretion.
They showed her very official-looking identity documents with diagonal red stripes and handed over a crisp envelope stuffed with francs. She nodded grimly, perhaps an old lady but a little more a woman of the world than they might suppose. They were welcome to her window; it was a change to have something going on in this dull old street. And did they wish to hear a thing or two about the butcher's wife?

Stollenbauer summoned Lötte Huber to his office, sat her down on a spindly little chair, rested his long fingers lightly on her knee, and told her, in strictest confidence, that their visitor was an associate of Heydrich himself.

Sénéschal had walked Lötte Huber through the “discovery” of the safe house and the Rote Grütze sauce and counseled how these successes should be explained. And what thanks did he get? The young woman's new sense of pride and achievement made her shut up like a clam. Under Szara's tutelage, he applied pressure every way he could. Told her
the big job
was now open at the Foreign Office— would he get it, or would his sworn enemy? Only she could help him now.

He took her to dinner at Fouquet's, fed her triangles of toast covered thickly with goose liver pâté and a bottle of Pomerol. The wine made her cute, funny, and romantic, but not talkative. Finally they fought. What use, she wanted to know, had the French Foreign Office for information that an associate of Heydrich's was coming to town for an important meeting? That was
the very sort of thing
that interested them, he said. The big cheese in his office was secretly a great admirer of Hitler and could be counted on to help, quietly, if any more problems developed with the meeting. But he had to be told exactly what was going on. No, she said, stop, you begin to sound like a spy. That made Sénéschal pale and Szara even paler when the conversation was reported. “Apologize,” Szara said. “Tell
her you were overwrought and”—he reached into a pocket and came forth with francs—“buy her jewelry.”

Szara accepted the inevitable. They weren't going to get the meeting date or the names of the other participants, surveillance was their only other option. He could not risk pressing Huber too hard and losing her as a source. It was the first time a wisp of regret floated across his view of the operation—it was not to be the last.

They drove to Puteaux in Sénéschal's car, parked in the narrow street, and watched the house—a surveillance technique that lasted exactly one hour and twelve minutes, perhaps a record for brevity. Children stared, young women pretended not to notice, an angry streetsweeper scraped the hubcap with his twig broom, and a drunk demanded money.
Discomfort
did not begin to describe how it felt; it just wasn't a neighborhood where you could do something like that.

Odile returned from her courier run to Berlin on 22 June (Baumann wouldn't budge), so she, Sénéschal, and Szara took turns sitting in the old lady's parlor. The wisp of regret had by now become a smoky haze that refused to dissipate. Goldman had the people to do this kind of work; Szara had to improvise with available resources. As for surveillance from the apartment, the principle was one thing, the reality another. The building, cold stone to the eye, was alive, full of inquisitive neighbors you couldn't avoid on the stairs. Szara squared his shoulders and scowled—
I am a policeman
— and left the old lady to deal with the inevitable tongue-wagging.

For her part, she seemed to be enjoying the attention. What she did not enjoy, however, was their company. They were, well,
there.
If somebody read a newspaper, it rattled; if she wanted to clean the carpet, they had to lift their feet. Odile finally saved the situation, discovering that the old lady had a passion for the card game called bezique, a form of pinochle. So the surveillance evolved into a more or less permanent card party, all three watchers contriving to play just badly enough to lose a few francs.