Dark Star (24 page)

“Tell me what to do,” Sénéschal said.

Szara tried to think of something, as though he knew. “Stay with the traffic,” he said. Sénéschal nodded vigorously, he would follow Szara's plan meticulously. He settled the Renault into traffic, which now began to thin out noticeably as they approached the eastern border of the city. At the next light, Szara leaned over in order to look in the rearview mirror. The Panhard was two cars back in the adjoining lane. The passenger saw what he was doing, stuck his arm out the window and waved. When the light changed, Sénéschal stamped the gas pedal against the floorboards, swerved around the car in front, changed lanes, turned off the headlights, and shot across the oncoming traffic into a side street.

Szara twisted around, but the Panhard was not to be seen. Sénéschal began to make lefts and rights, tearing through the darkness of deserted side streets while Szara watched for the Panhard. “Any idea where we are?” he said.

“The thirteenth.”

A shabby neighborhood, unlit; peeling wooden shutters protected the shopfronts. Up ahead, a broad boulevard appeared and Sénéschal pulled over and left the car idling as they both lit cigarettes. Szara's hands were trembling. “The passenger was at the safe house,” Sénéschal said. “You have his photograph. But the other one, with the cigar, where did he come from? ”

“I never saw him.”

“Nazis,” Sénéschal said. “Did you
see
them?”

“Yes.”

“What did they want?”

“To talk, they said.”

“Oh yes! I believe it!” He exhaled angrily and shook his head. “Shit.”

“Their time will come,” Szara said.

“Did you hear him? That cunt? ‘Please, may we speak a moment.' ” Sénéschal made the man sound effeminate and mincing.

“That was a good idea, cutting across.”

Sénéschal shrugged. “I just did it.” He flicked his cigarette out the window and eased the Renault into first gear, turning the headlights back on. He swung left onto the deserted boulevard. “A bad neighborhood,” he said. “Nobody comes here at night.”

They drove for five minutes, Szara spotted a Métro station on the corner. “Expect a contact by telephone. After that, our meetings will be as usual.”

“I'll be waiting,” Sénéschal said, voice mean and edgy. The brush with the Germans had frightened him. Now he was angry.

The car stopped in midblock and Szara got out and closed the door behind him. He thrust his hands in his pockets, squeezing the roll of film to make sure of it, and walked quickly toward the Métro entrance. He reached the grillwork arch above the stairway, saw it was the Tolbiac station, stopped dead as a metallic explosion echoed off the buildings followed by the sound of shattered glass raining on the pavement. He stared at the noise. Two blocks away the Renault was bent around the front of a car that had plowed into the driver's door. The passenger door was jammed open and something was lying in the street a few feet away from it. Szara started to run. Two men got out of the black car that had struck the Renault. One of them held his head and sat on the ground. The other ran to the thing in the street and bent over it. Szara stopped dead and found the shadows next to a building. Lights began to go on, heads appeared in windows. The glow of the street lamps was reflected in the liquid running into the street from the two cars, and the smell of gasoline reached him. The man who had been bending over the thing in the street squatted for a moment, seemed to be searching for something, then rose abruptly and kicked savagely at whatever it was that was lying there. People began to come out of their doorways, talking excitedly to each other. The man by the Renault now turned, took the other man under one arm and hauled him to his feet, pulling him forward, at
last getting him to stumble along quickly. They disappeared up a side street across the boulevard.

Walking quickly toward the cars, Szara found himself amid a small crowd of people. The Panhard's windshield was starred on the right side, and the driver's door on the Renault had been mashed halfway across the front seat by the impact. Sénéschal lay face down near the Renault's sprung passenger door, his jacket up over his head, shirttail pulled halfway out of his pants. A group of men stood around him, one bent down for a closer look, lifted the jacket, then straightened up, eyes shut in order not to see what he'd seen. He waved a dismissive hand across his body and said, “Don't look.” Another man said, “Did you see him
kick
him?” The voice was quivering. “He kicked a dead man. He did. I saw it.”

TRANSMISSION 11 JULY 1938 22:30 HOURS

TO JEAN MARC: DIRECTORATE JOINS YOU IN REGRET FOR LOSS OF COMRADE SILO. INQUIRY TO BE UNDERTAKEN BY YVES WITH ASSISTANCE OF ELLI, A REPORT TO BE MADE TO DIRECTORATE SOONEST OF CIRCUMSTANCES PERTINENT TO THIS INCIDENT WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO PREVIOUS ACCIDENT INVOLVING FORMER DEPUTY. ESSENTIAL TO DETERMINE EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES OF BOTH THESE INCIDENTS WITH REGARD TO THEIR POSSIBLE INTENTIONAL ORIGIN. THE REMOTEST POSSIBILITY TO BE CONSIDERED. ALL OPAL PERSONNEL TO BE ON HIGHEST ALERT FOR HOSTILE ACTION AGAINST THE NETWORK.

THERE IS GRAVE CONCERN FOR THE CONTINUITY OF THE ARBOR PRODUCT. SINCE HECTOR WAS PRESENT WHEN INITIAL CONTACT MADE BETWEEN ARBOR AND SILO, AND HECTOR HAS BEEN PRESENTED AS THE FRIEND OF SILO, CAN HECTOR FIND MEANS TO OPERATE AS SILO'S REPLACEMENT IN THIS RELATIONSHIP? HECTOR TO SHOW CONCERN AS FAMILY FRIEND AND PROVIDE COMFORT AS HE IS ABLE. IT IS SUGGESTED THAT SILO'S FUNERAL IS THE LOGICAL SETTING FOR CONTACT BETWEEN HECTOR AND ARBOR. ALTERNATIVELY, IF SILO'S TRUE POLITICAL AFFILIATION IS REVEALED, CAN PRESSURE BE BROUGHT TO BEAR ONARBOR? WILL ARBOR COOPERATE IN THIS CONTEXT? RESPOND BY 14 JULY.

OTTER MUST BE PRESSED TO EXPAND HIS REPORTING. RECOMMEND NEW MEASURES TO BE TAKEN WITHIN 48 HOURS.

ACCOUNT NO. 414-223-8/74 AT BANQUE SUISSE DE GENEVE TO BE CLOSED. NEW ACCOUNT NO. 609-846 DX 12 AT CREDIT LE-MANS OPERATIVE AS OF 15 JULY IN NAME COMPAGNIE ROMAILLES WITH CREDIT OF 50,000 FRENCH FRANCS. 10,000 FRANCS TO BE TAKEN BY COURIER TO YVES. DIRECTOR

Sitting in the hot, dirty room where Kranov transmitted and decoded, Szara tossed the message aside. The frantic endgame attempted by the Directorate, their shrill tone, and the certainty of failure he found faintly depressing. He perfectly remembered the André Szara who would have been enraged by the Directorate's calculating attitude, a man who, not so very long ago, believed passionately that the only unforgivable human sin was a cold heart. Now he was not that man. He understood what they wanted, understood them for wanting it, and knew the result: Lötte Huber was lost. Sénéschal's friend Valais,
HECTOR,
also a lawyer formerly active in the French Communist party, had been with Sénéschal the night they'd “met” Huber and her friend at the theater, and had been brought on stage as a confidant—
Lötte, he's so worried and upset, you must help him
—to move the operation along. But Huber would never accept him as a lover; this was
analyst's
thinking, a scheme created at a great distance from events and in breathtaking ignorance of the personalities involved. Valais was a ponderous, contemplative man, a fair-skinned Norman lacking entirely Sénéschal's Mediterranean intensity and charm.

And blackmail was absurd. Huber would go to pieces, bring the French police down on their heads. Moscow was clearly rattled: losing first the operative Szara had replaced, in an auto accident outside Mâcon, and now Sénéschal in what had been presented to them as a second auto accident, a hit-and-run tragedy.

For Szara had not told them otherwise.

A pawn in
khvost
politics had become an active participant.

Was he to inform the Directorate, and thus Dershani, of photographs taken in a Puteaux garden? A secret meeting of senior Soviet and German intelligence officers, perhaps of diplomatic importance, not so secret after all. Penetrated. Photographed. Maybe the Directorate knew of Dershani's contact with the Nazi service.

Maybe it didn't.

The Germans certainly wanted to keep the contact secret— they'd murdered Sénéschal on that basis. So what would the NKVD have in store for him? He chose not to find that out, instead undertook a damage control program to protect himself, informing Schau-Wehrli that, according to Huber's final report to Sénéschal, the grand meeting had not yet taken place, and cabling both Goldman and Moscow to that effect.

Odile, of course, presented a very different problem and he'd had to approach her directly. He'd gotten her off by herself and placed his life in her hands: there will be an investigation; you must not tell the Brussels
rezident,
or anybody, what you were doing on the days leading up to 9 July. He'd watched her, a tough Belgian girl from the mining towns, raw, nineteen, and loyal to the death once she got it straightened out what was what. She'd thought it over for quite some time. Her face, usually flip and sexy and moody all at once, was closed, immobile, he couldn't read it. Finally, she'd agreed. She trusted him, instinctively, and perhaps she feared it was already too late to tell the truth. She also knew, from growing up within Communist party politics, that conspiracy was bread-and-butter to them all: you chose a side and lived with the result.

The photographs had turned out to be adequate. He'd had them developed by randomly choosing a little shop, assuming the technician would make no particular sense of the subjects. Picking them up in midafternoon, he'd found an empty booth in a deserted café and spent an hour turning them over in his hands, cloudy black and white impressions shot from above, eleven prints paid for with a life. The crisp, young security man opening a gate. Head and shoulders of a man at the wheel of a car. Car window with a faint blur behind it. Dershani and the Gestapo officer in a garden, the German speaking tentatively, left hand turned up to emphasize a point.

There was no photograph of the man with the cigar who drove the Panhard, Sénéschal had not managed to record his own murderer.

Now, what to do with them. He'd thought about that for a long time, then decided that if Bloch didn't contact him he'd pass them to Abramov whenever an opportunity presented itself. Not officially, not through the system, friend to friend. Until then, he'd hide them in his apartment.

As he thought about the photographs, the blacked-out room began to feel claustrophobic. A few feet away, facing the opposite wall, Kranov worked like a machine. The rhythmic tapping of his wireless key grated across Szara's nerves, so he filed the Moscow cable in a metal box and left the house, walking out into the still night air and heading toward the canals. The slaughterhouse workers were hard at it on the loading docks of the abattoirs, hefting bloody beef quarters on their shoulders, then swinging them in to butchers who waited in the backs of their trucks. They cursed and laughed as they worked, wiping the sweat from their eyes, brushing the flies off their spattered aprons. In a brightly lit café, a blind man played the violin and a whore danced on a table while the raucous crowd teased him with lurid descriptions of what he was missing, and he smiled and played in such a way as to let them know he saw more than they did. Szara walked on the cobbled pathway by the canal, then stood for a time and watched the reflections of the neon signs, bending and bowing with the motion of the black water.

To Sénéschal, dead because of his, Szara's, ignorance and inexperience, he could only give a place in his heart. He wondered if he'd ever learn how the Germans had managed it—the discovery of the surveillance, the tracking of the Renault while remaining invisible. Technically, they were simply more adept than he was—only the chance decision to use the Tolbiac Métro had saved his life— thus Sénéschal was gone, and he was the one left to stare into the dead waters of the canal and think about life. His sentence was to understand that, and to remember it. To remember also, forever, the driver of the Panhard, a dim shape seen at a distance, barely the form of a man, then the savage kick, a spasm of useless rage.
Sudden, without warning;
like the blow that had knocked him to the floor of a railway station buffet in Prague. He watched the wavering
signs in the water, red and blue, recalled what Sénéschal had said about his girlfriend, the one who threw nothing away, the one for whom anything could be made to last a little longer.

8 July.

He took the night train to Lisbon.

Sat up in coach, saving money, anticipating the cost of lovers' feasts: iced prawns with mayonnaise, the wine called Barca Velha, cool from the cellar of the
taberna.
Then too, he did not want to sleep. Somewhere out on the ocean, he imagined, Marta Haecht was also awake. Avoiding the ghastly end-of-voyage parties she would be standing at the rail, watching for a landfall glow in the distance, only dimly aware of the Strength through Joy revelers braying Nazi songs in the ship's ballroom. In her purse she would have the letter, carefully folded, something to laugh about in Portugal.

Nothing so good for a lover as a train ride through the length of the night, the endless click of the rails, the locomotive sometimes visible in the moonlight as it worked its way around a long curve. All night long he summoned memories—
Is there a place I may undress?
The train pounded through the vineyards of Gascony at dawn. He stood in the alcove at the end of the car, watched the rails glitter as they swept below the coupling, smelled the burnt cinder in the air. It was cold in the foothills of the Pyrénées; the scent of pine resin sharpened as the sun climbed the slopes. Falangist Guardia in leather hats checked the passports at the Hendaye border crossing, then they were in Franco's Spain all day long. They passed a burned-out tank, a raw lumber gallows standing at the edge of a town.

The haze shimmered in the hills north of Lisbon. The city itself was numb, exhausted in the faded summer light of evening. The carriage horses at the station barely bothered to flick their tails. Szara found a hotel called the Mirador, with Moorish turrets and balconies, and took a room above a courtyard where a fountain gushed rusty water over broken tiles and heavy roses lay sodden in the heat. He put his toothbrush in a glass, then went out for a long walk, eventually buying a pair of linen pants, a thin white shirt, and
a panama hat. He changed in the store and a Spanish couple asked directions of him on the way back to the hotel.