Dark Star (30 page)

“So it's all nothing more than conversation.”

She studied him for a moment. “You are very rude,” she said.

“Forgive me. It's just curiosity. I don't care what you do.”

“Well, as I'm certain you know, this wasn't my idea.”

“No?”

“Hardly. When they discovered I'd snuck out of Russia and was in Berlin, they sent some
people,
not like you, around.” She shrugged, remembering the moment. “Offered a choice between death and money, I chose money.”

Szara nodded in sympathy.

“We go to … parties, my little troupe and I. Parties of a sort, you know. We're considered a terrific amount of fun. People drink. Lose their inhibitions. Shall you hear it all?”

“Of course not.”

She smiled. “It isn't so bad as you think. I avoid the worst of it, but my associates, well. Not that I'm innocent, you understand. I've known a couple of them better than I should have.” She paused. Looked at him critically, closed one eye. “You must be a writer—so serious. Everything
means
something, but we … In the theater, you know, we're like naughty children, like brothers and sisters playing behind the shed. So these things don't mean so much, it's a way to forget yourself, that's all. One night you're this person and the next night you're that person, so that sometimes you're no person at all. This profession … it deforms the heart. Perhaps. I don't know.”

She was lost for a moment, sitting on the edge of the chaise, weight borne by elbows on knees, glass held in both hands. “As for the Nazis, well, they're really more like pigs than humans, if you think about it. The men—and the women—just like pigs, they even squeal like pigs. It's no insult to say this, it's literal. It isn't their
‘Schweine!'
that I'm talking about but real pigs: pink, overweight, quite intelligent if you know anything about them, certainly smarter than dogs, but very appetitious, there the common wisdom has it just right. They do want what they want, and lots of it, and right away, and then, when they get it, they're happy. Blissful.”

“I thought you said the man who came to see you was like a boar.”

“I did say that, didn't I. I'm sure there's a difference, though. You just have to be much smarter than me to see it.”

From the stage Szara could hear the ringing tones of a soliloquy, a kind of triumphant anger shot through with blistering rectitude. Then a pause, then desultory applause, then the creak of an unoiled mechanism closing the curtain. This was followed by a heavy tread in the hallway, a man's gruff voice,
“Scheiss!”
and the emphatic slam of a door.

“There,” said Tscherova, switching into German, “that's the captain now. A simple
Volk.”

Szara reached into his pockets and withdrew the thick wads of reichsmarks. She nodded, took them from him, stood, and stuffed the pockets of a long wool coat hanging on a peg.

Szara now assumed their conversation to be perfectly audible to the “captain” next door. “You'll take care of your, ah, health. I really hope you will.”

“Oh yes.”

He stood in order to leave; in the small room they were a little closer together than strangers would normally have been. “It's better,” he said quietly, “not to find out how it would be. Yes?”

She smiled impishly, amused that the proximity affected him. “You
are
different, you are. And you mustn't be too concerned.” Her slim hand brushed the waistband of her slacks, then held up a tiny vial of yellow liquid. Her eyebrow lifted,
see how clever?
“End of story,” she said. “Curtain.” Then she hid it behind her back, as though it didn't exist. She bent toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth—very warm and very brief—and whispered good-bye, in Russian, next to his ear.

Szara walked east from the theater, away from the Adlon, unconsciously following procedure. Balked by the Neu-Kölln Canal, he veered south to Gertraudten Bridge, lit a cigarette, watched orange peels and scrapwood drifting past on the black water. It was colder, the lamp lights had pale halos as mist drifted off the canal.

The Directorate never knew their agents in person; Szara now saw the reason for that. Tscherova's vulnerability would not leave his mind. Caught between the Gestapo and the NKVD, between Germany and Russia, she lived by her wits, by looking as she did, by clever talk. But she would have to drink the yellow liquid eventually, maybe soon, and the idea of so much life—all the emotional weather that blew across her heart—winding up as a formless shape collapsed in a corner tormented him. Could a woman be too beautiful to die? Moscow wouldn't like his answer to that. Was he a little bit in love with her? What if he was. Was all her capering about, the way she worked on him with her eyes, meant to draw him to her? He was sure of it. How could that be wrong?

She'd have to drink the liquid because agents didn't survive. The result of all the elaborate defenses, secrecy and codes and clandestine methods of every sort, was time gained, only that, against a known destiny. Things went wrong. Things always, eventually, went wrong. The world was unpredictable, inconsistent, volatile, ultimately a madhouse of bizarre events. Agents got caught. Almost always. You replaced them. That's what the
apparat
expected you to do: reorganize the chaos, mend the damage, and go on. There were ways in which he accepted that, but when women entered the equation he failed. His need was to protect women, not to sacrifice them, and he could not, would not, change. An ancient instinct, to stand between women and danger, sapped his will to run operations the way they had to be run and made him a bad intelligence officer—it was just that simple. And the worst part of it was that the yellow liquid wasn't part of some spy kit—the NKVD didn't believe in such things. No, Tscherova had obtained the liquid herself, because she knew what happened to agents just as well as he did and she wanted to have it over and done with when the time came. The idea made him ill, the world couldn't go on that way.

But they had a Jew up on the end of Brüderstrasse, where Szara turned north, a pack of drunken Hitlerjugend in their fancy uniforms, teenagers, forcing some poor soul on hands and knees to drink the black water in a gutter, and they were shouting and laughing and singing and having a tremendously good time at it.

Szara faded into a doorway. For a moment he thought he was
having a stroke—his vision swam and a terrible force hammered against his temples like a fist. Steadying himself against a wall, he realized it wasn't a stroke, it was rage, and he fought to subdue it. For a moment he went mad, shutting his eyes against the pounding blood and pleading with God for a machine gun, a hand grenade, a pistol, any weapon at all—but this prayer was not immediately answered. Later he discovered a small chip missing from a front tooth. Some time after midnight, having crept away into the darkness, walking through deserted streets toward his hotel, he made the inevitable connection: Tscherova, by what she did, could help to destroy these people, these youths with their Jewish toy. She could weaken them in ways they did not understand, she was more than a machine gun or a pistol, a far deadlier weapon than any he'd wished for. The knowledge tore at him, on top of what he'd seen, and there were tears on his face that he wiped off with the sleeve of his raincoat.

The following afternoon, he told Marta Haecht what he'd seen. Instinctively she reached for him, but when her hands flew to touch him he no more than allowed it, unwilling to reject an act of love, but equally unwilling to be comforted.

This was pain he meant to keep.

To maintain his cover, he had to write something.

“Nothing political,” Goldman had warned. “Let Tass file on diplomatic developments; you find yourself something meaningless, filler. Just pretend that some ambitious editor has taken it into his head that
Pravda's
view on Germany needs the Szara touch. Even with all the bad blood and political hostility, life goes on. A bad job but you're making the best of it; you want to lead the Reich press office to believe that, a little of their fine Teutonic contempt is the very thing for you. For the moment, let them sneer.”

Midmorning, in the dining room at the Adlon, Szara submitted himself to the tender mercies of Vainshtok. The little man ran his fingers through his hair and studied his list of possible stories. “A
Szara needs help from a Vainshtok?” he said. “I knew the world was turning upside down, Armageddon expected any day now, but this!”

“What have you got?” Szara said. He caught the attention of a passing waiter: “A Linzer torte for my friend, plenty of schlag on it.”

Vainshtok's eyebrows shot up. “You're in trouble. That I can tell. My mama always warned me, ‘Darling son, when they put the whipped cream on the Linzer torte, watch out.' What is it, André Aronovich? Have you fallen from favor at last? Got a girlfriend who's giving you a hard time? Getting older?”

“I can't stand Berlin, Vainshtok. I can't think in this place.”

“Oy, he can't stand Berlin. Last year they sent me to Madagascar. I ate, I believe I actually ate, a lizard. Did you hear the china breaking, Szara, wherever you were? Eleven generations of Vainshtok rabbis were going wild up in heaven, breaking God's kosher plates,
‘Gott im Himmel!
Little Asher Moisevich is eating a lizard!' Ah, here's something, how about weather? ”

“What about it?”

“It's happening every day.”

“And?”

“Well, it's not especially cold, and it's not especially hot. But more than likely such a story won't stir up the Reichsministries. On the other hand, it might. ‘What do you mean,
normal?
Our German weather is clean and pure, like no other weather anywhere!' ”

Szara sighed. He hadn't the strength to fight back.

“All right, all right,” Vainshtok said as his treat arrived, swimming in cream. “You're going to make me cry. Take Frau Kummel, up in Lübeck. Actually she's called Mutter Kummel, Mother Kummel. It's a story you can write, and it gets you out of Berlin for the day.”

“Mutter Kummel?”

“I'll write down the address for you. Yesterday she turned a hundred years old. Born the first of November, 1838. Imagine all the exciting things she's seen—she may even remember some of them. 1838? Schleswig-Holstein still belonged to the Danes, Lübeck was part of the independent state of Mecklenburg. Germany—of course
you'll have to say
Germany as we know it today
—didn't exist. You're to be envied, Szara. What a thrilling time that was, and Mutter Kummel somehow lived through every minute of it.”

He took the train that afternoon, a grim ride up through the flat-lands of the Lüneberg Plain, through marshy fields where gusts of wind flattened the reeds under a hard, gray sky. He avoided Hamburg by taking the line that went through Schwerin, and outside a little village not far from the sea he spotted a highway sign by a tight curve in the road:
Drive carefully! Sharp curve! Jews
yj
miles an hour!

Mutter Kummel lived with her eighty-one-year-old daughter in a gingerbread house in the center of Lübeck. “Another reporter, dear mother,” said the daughter when Szara knocked at the door. The house smelled of vinegar, and the heat of the place made him sweat as he scribbled in his notebook. Mutter Kummel remembered quite a bit about Lübeck: where the old butcher shop used to be, the day the rope parted and the tumbling church bell broke through the belfry floor and squashed a deacon. What Nezhenko would make of all this Szara could only imagine, let alone some coal miner in the Donbas, wrapping his lunch potato in the newspaper. But he worked at it and did the job as best he could. Toward the end of the interview the old lady leaned forward, her placid face crowned by a bun of white hair, and told him how
die Juden
were no longer to be found in Lübeck—yet one more change she'd witnessed in her many years in the town. Polite people when one met them in the street, it had to be admitted, but she wasn't sorry to see them go. “Those Jews,” she confided, “for too long they've stolen our souls.” Szara must have looked inquisitive. “Oh yes, young man. It's what they did, and we here in Lübeck knew about it,” she said slyly. Szara, for a moment, was tempted to ask her to explain—for he sensed she'd worked it out—the mechanics of such a thing: how it was actually accomplished, where the Jews hid the stolen souls and what they did with them. But he didn't. He thanked the ladies and took the train back to Berlin and an evening with Marta Haecht, the promise of which had kept him more or less sane for another day.

•

Later on, he would have reason to remember that afternoon.

Later on, when everything had changed, he would wonder what might have happened if he'd missed the Berlin train, if he'd had to spend the night in Lübeck. But he knew himself, knew that he would have found some way to be with Marta Haecht that night. He considered himself a student of destiny, perhaps even a
connoisseur
—that obnoxious word—of its tricks and turns: how it hunted, how it fed.

He would see himself on the train to Berlin, a man who'd beaten his way across a lifeless afternoon by banking thoughts of the evening. And though the browns and grays of the German November flowed past the train window he was not there to see them; he was lost in anticipation, lost in lover's greed. In fact, he would ask himself, what
didn't
he want? He certainly wanted her, wanted her in the ways of a Victorian novel kept in a night table drawer—what magnificent fantasies he made for himself on that train! But that wasn't all. He wanted affection; kindness, refuge. He wanted to spend the night with his lover. He wanted to play. The game of temptations and surrenders, cunning noes and yesses. And then he wanted to talk—to talk in the darkness where he could say anything he liked, then he wanted to sleep, all wrapped and twined around her in a well-warmed bed. He even wanted breakfast. Something delicious.

And what he wanted, he got.

In its very own diabolical way, destiny delivered every last wish. Only it added a little something extra, a little something he didn't expect, buried it right in the midst of all his pleasures where he'd be sure to find it.