Dark Star (25 page)

He spotted a Russian émigré newspaper at a kiosk, then spent the night reading to the whirr of cicadas and the splashing of the cracked fountain.
Stalin the Murderer! Prince Cheyalevsky Presents a Check to the Orphans' League. Mme Tsoutskaya Opens Milliner's Shop.
At dawn, he forced the ancient shutters closed, but he could not sleep. He had not asked Goldman's permission to leave Paris— he doubted it would have been granted; Sénéschal's death had everybody on edge—nor had he told Schau-Wehrli where he was going. Nobody knew where he was, and such freedom made it impossible to sleep. He wasn't seriously missing, not yet. He gave himself a week for that; then they'd panic, start calling the morgue and the hospitals.

Walking back to the hotel, he'd happened on a family of Jews: ashen faces, downcast eyes, dragging what remained of their possessions down the hill toward the docks. From Poland, he suspected. They'd come a long way, and now they were headed—where? South America? Or the United States?

Would
she
go? Yes, eventually she would. Not at first, not right away—one didn't just walk away from one's life. But later, after they'd made love, really made love, then she would go with him. He could see her: head propped on hand, sweat between her breasts, brown eyes liquid and intense; could hear the cicadas, the shutter creaking in the evening breeze.

He had money. Barely enough, but enough. They'd go to the American consulate and request visitors' visas. Then they would vanish. What else was America but that, the land of the vanished.

At ten the next morning he watched the docking of the liner
Hermann Krieg
—a Nazi martyr, no doubt. A crowd of German workers streamed down the gangplank, grinning at the brutal white sun they'd come to worship. The men leered at the dark Portuguese women in their black shawls, the wives took a firm grip on their husbands' arms.

Marta Haecht was nowhere to be seen.

•

That summer, the heat spared nobody.

And while London gardens wilted and Parisian dogs slept under café tables, New York positively steamed.
ANOTHER SCORCHER,
the
Daily Mirror
howled, while the
New York Times
said “Temperatures Are Expected to Reach 98° Today.” It was impossible to sleep at night. Some people gathered on tenement stoops and spoke in low voices; others sat in the darkness, listened to Benny Goodman's band on the radio, and drank gallons of iced tea.

It was bad during the week, but the August heat wave seemed to save its truly hellish excesses for the weekends. You could take the subway to Coney Island or the long trolley ride to Jones Beach, but you could hardly see the sand for the bodies much less find a spot to spread out your towel. The ocean itself seemed warm and sticky, and a sunburn made everything worse.

About the best you could hope for on the weekends was to own a little house in the country somewhere or, almost as good, to have an invitation to stay with somebody who did. Thus Herb Hull, senior editor at the magazine trying to make space for itself between the
Nation
and the
New Republic,
was elated to receive a Tuesday morning telephone call from Elizabeth May, asking him to come down with them on Friday night to their place in Bucks County. Jack May ran one of the Schubert box offices in the West Forties theater district, Elizabeth was a social worker at a Lower East Side settlement house. They were not Hull's close friends, but neither were they simply acquaintances. It was instead something in between, a sort of casual intimacy New Yorkers often fell into.

After the usual misadventures—a traffic jam in the Holland Tunnel, an overheating problem in the Mays' '32 Ford outside Somerville, New Jersey—they reached a sturdy little fieldstone house at the edge of a small pond. The house was typical: small bedrooms reached by a staircase with a squeaky step, battered furniture, bookcase full of murder mysteries left by former guests, and a bed in the guest room that smelled of mildew. Not far from Philadelphia, Bucks County had summer homes and artists' studios up every dirt road. Writers, painters, playwrights, editors, and literary agents tended to cluster there, as did people who worked at a great range of occupations but whose evenings were committed to books
and plays and Carnegie Hall. They arrived on Friday night, unloaded the weekend groceries (corn, tomatoes, and strawberries would be bought at roadside stands), ate sandwiches, and went to bed early. Saturday morning was spent fussing at projects that never got done—you just weren't enjoying the country if you didn't “fix” something—then the rest of the weekend drifted idly by in talking and drinking and reading in all their combinations. At Saturday night parties you'd see the same people you saw in Manhattan during the week.

Herb Hull was delighted to spend the weekend with the Mays. They were very bright and well read, the rye and bourbon flowed freely, and Elizabeth was a fine cook, known for corn fritters and Brunswick stew. That's what they had for dinner on Saturday night. Then they decided to skip the usual party, instead sat around, sipping drinks while Jack played Ellington records on the Victrola.

The Mays were charter subscribers to Hull's magazine and avid supporters of the causes it embraced. Not Party people but enlightened and progressive, fairly staunch for Roosevelt though they had voted for Debs in '32. The conversation all across Bucks County that night was politics, and the Mays' living room was no exception. In unison, the three lamented the isolationists, who wanted no part of “that mess in Europe,” and the German-American Bund, which supported them, de facto encouragement to Hitler. Sorrowfully, they agreed that there was no saving the Sudetenland; Hitler would snap it up as he had Austria. There would eventually be war, but America would stay out. That was shameful, cowardly, ultimately frightening. What had become of American idealism? Had the grinding poverty of the Depression gutted the national values? Was the country really going to be run by Westbrook Pegler and Father Coughlin? Did the American people hate Russia so much they were going to let Hitler have his way in Europe?

“That's the crux of it,” Jack May said angrily, shaking his head in frustration.

Hull agreed. It was all pretty sad stuff: Henry Ford and his anti-Semite pals, plenty of people down in Washington who didn't want to get involved in Europe, the hate groups claiming that Roosevelt was “Rosenfeld,” a Bolshevik Jew. “But you know,” Hull said,
“Stalin isn't exactly helping matters. Some of the statements out of Moscow are pretty wishy-washy, and he's got Litvinov, the foreign minister, running all over Europe trying to play the same sort of diplomacy game as England and France. That won't stop Hitler, he understands the difference between treaties and tanks.”

“Ah for Christ sakes,” Jack May said. “You know the situation in Russia. Stalin's got two hundred million peasants to feed. What's he supposed to do?”

“Herb, weren't you there this year? ” Elizabeth asked.

“Last winter.”

“What was it like? ”

“Oh, secret and strange—you get the sense of people listening behind the drapes. Poor. Just not enough to go around. Passionate for ideas and literature. A writer there is truly important, not just a barking dog on a leash. If I had to put it in two words, I guess one would be
inconvenient.
Why I don't know, but everything, and I do mean everything, is just so damn difficult. But the other word would have to be something like
exhilarating.
They're really trying to make it all work, and you can definitely feel that, like something in the air.”

Jack May looked at his wife, a mock-quizzical expression on his face. “Did he have a good time?”

Elizabeth laughed.

“It was fascinating, that I can't deny.”

“And Stalin? What do they think about him? ” she asked.

May took Hull's glass from the coffee table and splashed some bourbon over a fresh ice cube. Hull took a sip while May turned the record over. “ They certainly watch what they say. You never know who's listening. But at the same time they're Slavs, not Anglo-Saxons, and they want to open their heart to you if you're a friend. So you do hear stories.”

“Gossip?” May said. “Or the real thing?”

“Funny, they don't gossip, not truly, not the way we do. They're instinctively restrained about love affairs and such. As for ‘the real thing,' yes, sometimes. I met one fellow who's got a story about how Stalin was secretly in cahoots with the Okhrana. Pretty good
story, actually—lively, factual. I think we'll run it around Christmas.”

“Oh, that old red herring,” Elizabeth scoffed. “That's been around for years.”

Hull chuckled. “Well, there you have the magazine business. It'll make the Stalinists mad as hell, but they won't cancel their subscriptions, they'll just write letters. Then the socialists and the Trotskyites will write back, madder yet. We'll sell some newsstand copies in the Village. In the long run it's just dialogue, open forum, everyone gets to take their turn at bat.”

“But is this person actually in a position to know something like that?” Elizabeth was slightly wide-eyed at the possibility.

Hull thought for a time. “Maybe. Maybe not. We'll acknowledge, implicitly, that we really don't know. ‘Who can say what goes on behind the walls of the Kremlin?' Not quite so obvious as that, but in that general direction.”

“What are you?
Time
magazine?” May was getting ready to argue.

Hull shrugged it off. “I wish we had the Luces' money. But I'll tell you something, though it's never to leave this room. We're all of us,
Time
included, in the same boat. The editorial slant is different—is it ever—but we're nothing without the readership, and we've just got to come up with something juicy once in a while. But don't be alarmed, the rest of the issue will be as usual—plenty of polemic, snarling capitalists and courageous workers, a Christmas cry for justice. I think you'll like it.”

“Sounds pretty damn cynical to me,” May grumbled.

Elizabeth rushed in. “Oh poo! Just think about the stuff they put on stage where you work. You're just being critical, Jack, admit it.”

May smiled ruefully. “Democracy in action,” he said. “Makes everybody mad.”

It certainly made somebody mad.

On the night of 14 September the editorial offices of Hull's magazine were burned, and “Who Was the Okhrana's Mysterious Man? ”
went up with all the other paper, or was presumed to have, because all they ever found were gray mounds of wet ash that went into the East River along with the chairs and desks and typewriters and, in the event, the magazine itself.

It was certainly no accident—the gasoline can was left right there on the floor of the editor-in-chief's office, where the arson investigators found it when they picked through what remained of the ceiling. Some of the newspaper beatmen asked the Fire lieutenant who'd done it, but all he gave them was an eloquent Irish smile: these little commie outfits, how the hell was anybody going to know what went on, maybe a rival, maybe they didn't pay the printer, the list was too long.

At first, the magazine's board of directors thought they intended to go forward bravely, but wisdom ultimately prevailed. The venture had already eaten one trust fund and ruined a marriage, maybe they'd best leave the field to the competition. Herb Hull was on the street for exactly three weeks, then signed on with a glossy, general readership magazine, a big one. His new job was to go up against
Collier's
and the
Saturday Evening Post,
which meant getting to know a whole new crowd of writers, but Hull, God help him, liked writers and soon enough he had the stories coming—“Amelia Earhart, Is She Still Alive?”—and life for him was back to normal. He had a pretty good idea of why the magazine office burned up but he kept it to himself—martyrdom was not in his stars—though he did sometimes play a little game with four or five names he could have jotted down if he'd wanted to.

André Szara found out a few days later. Standing at a zinc bar in the rue du Cherche-Midi, drinking his morning coffee, he thumbed through one of the official newspapers of the French left and read about the fire, obviously set, said its American correspondent, by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI or its fascist stooges, as part of their hate campaign against the progressive and peace-loving workers of all nations.

Szara felt little enough on reading it, simply a sense of recognition. He turned the event over in his mind for a time, staring out at
the street. The purge was slowly dying out, like a fire that has consumed everything in its path and at last consumes itself: one week earlier, Goldman had quietly informed him during a meeting in Brussels that Yezhov was on the way out. What had actually happened? The NKVD had surely learned of the article and prevented its publication. But just as surely Stalin had been told—or seen the article himself, since they had likely stolen it before they set the fire. Had he been influenced? Jogged just enough in a certain way at a certain time so that ending the purge now seemed preferable to continuing it? Or was it simply coincidence, a confluence of events? Or was there yet more to the story than he knew? There was an excellent possibility that he had not been the only one set in motion against the purge; intelligence operations simply did not work that way—one brave man against the world. The expectation of failure was too high in any individual case for the skillful operator not to have several attacks going at once.

Finally, he couldn't be sure of anything.
Perhaps this morning I have actually been victorious,
he thought. He could not imagine a greater absence of drums and trumpets. And he did not care. Since Sénéschal's death and his return from Lisbon he found he didn't particularly care about anything, and he found also that this made life, or his life anyhow, much simpler. He finished the coffee, left a few coins on the bar, and headed off to a press conference with the Swedish ambassador, first putting up his umbrella, for it had begun to rain.