Dark Star (33 page)

There were tears on Baumann's face. He did not move.

Szara began dragging him across the floor until, at last, Baumann started crawling. Szara spoke to him like a child: “Yes, that's it.” Somewhere close by he heard the splintering sound of a door being ripped off its hinges and he glanced, horrified, toward the stairway, then realized the noise came from below, that they were after the scrolls of the Torah in the ark. The smell of burning was getting stronger; a curl of smoke worked through the floorboards in one corner. He leaned Baumann against the wall below the window and spoke by his ear: “Go ahead, I'll help you, it isn't far and then we'll be safe.” Baumann mumbled something—Szara couldn't understand what he said but it meant he wanted to be left to die. Infuriated, Szara pushed him aside and worked his way through the jagged circle of broken glass and wood, tumbling forward onto his hands on the tarred gravel surface of the roof of the lumberyard shed. He scrambled to his feet and reached back through the opening, getting a grip on the lapels of Baumann's jacket and hauling him forward. When Baumann's weight began to tilt over the sill, he thrust out his hands instinctively and the two of them fell together.

Szara lay stunned for a moment. Falling backward and taking Baumann's weight had knocked the wind out of him. Then he began to breathe again and, in the cold air, became aware of a wet sock. He struggled away from Baumann and sat up to look at his ankle. Blood was welling steadily from a slash down his shin. He pressed the wound together for a moment, then remembered about silhouettes and threw himself on his stomach. Baumann's breathing distracted him—loud and hoarse, like sighing. He moved the man's hand, which lay flaccid against his chest, and felt for a heartbeat. What he found was a shock—a beating of such force and speed it frightened him. “How is it?” he asked.

“My God in heaven,” Baumann said.

“We're going to be all right,” Szara said. “I'll buy you a dinner in Amsterdam.”

Baumann smiled weakly, the wind blowing strands of his hair around, one side of his face pressed against the black surface of the roof, and nodded yes, that's what they would do.

Szara began to think about the operative and the car, then decided to try to get a look from the edge of the roof. Very carefully he moved forward, scraping his cheek against the surface, staying as flat as possible, gaining an inch at a time until he could just see over the end of the shed. He could not get a view of the path by the board fence where he'd left the car—the angle was wrong. But he was high enough to look out over part of Wittenau, the Havel, and an ancient stone bridge that crossed the river. His eyes were beginning to water from the smoke—the fire was taking hold; the old wood snapped and exploded as it caught—but what there was to see, he saw: a group of men with torches shifting restlessly in a knot at the center of the bridge, an instant of motion in the darkness. Then there was a scream that carried perfectly on the night air, a white churning in the water at the foot of the bridge pier, a strangled cry for help, the yellow arc of a torch hurled into the water, then laughter and cheering as the men on the bridge headed back into Wittenau. Some of them began to sing.

As the fire swept up the front of the synagogue it illuminated the shed, and Szara scrambled backward, afraid of being seen. Burning embers were all over the roof, producing, for the moment, only an oily black smoke from the tar surface. He realized it was only a matter of time before the shed, and the lumberyard, went up in flames. Just before he retreated, he saw fiery shapes flying into the street from the direction of the synagogue door—long dowels on either side of thick, yellow parchment. The Nazis, not content to burn down the synagogue, were making a special, private bonfire of the Torah scrolls from the ark, first stripping off the ceremonial satin covers.
Now they'll have to be buried,
Szara thought. He wondered how he remembered that but it was true, it was the law: a burnt Torah had to be buried in the graveyard, like a dead person, there was a ceremony for it. It was part of growing up in the Pale of Settlement, knowing such lore—rituals for raped women and all sorts of useful knowledge—for these things had happened many times before.

•

It was another thirty minutes before they got away. After watching the fire for a time, the mob had gone off in search of further amusement. Szara and Baumann stayed where they were, lying flat to conceal themselves, brushing embers off their clothing with the sleeves of their jackets. From where they lay they could see the dancing orange shadows of other fires against the night sky, could hear the showers of falling glass, occasional shouts or cries, but no sirens. The lumberyard caught first—that was bad because of the burning creosote—and then the shed, an afterthought. Szara and Baumann worked their way backward off the roof, dropping to the ground on the side away from the street. They circled behind the synagogue, now collapsed into itself around a column of fire that roared like a wind, and made a dash for the Humboldt.

They saw only one person, standing alone in the darkness: a town policeman, wearing the traditional high helmet with polished brasswork and short visor—something like the old-fashioned spiked
Pickelhaube
of the 1914 war—with a strap pulled up ferociously tight just under the chin. By the light of the flames Szara saw his face and was struck by a kind of anguish in it. Not sorrow for Jews or synagogues—it wasn't that. It had more to do with a life dedicated to perfect order, where no crime should ever go unpunished— a murder or a piece of paper tossed in the street, it was all the same to this face. Yet tonight the policeman had certainly seen arson— and perhaps murder, if he'd looked in the direction of the river— and had done nothing about it because he had been told to do nothing about it. Evidently, he had not really known what to do, so had stationed himself across the street from the fire, on the night when the firemen never came, and there he stood, rigid, anguished, in some sense ruined and aware of it.

The car was empty, the passenger door ajar as it had been left.

It would make, Szara thought, at least a hiding place, and he directed Baumann to lie flat on the floor below the back seat while he would do the same in front. As they entered the car, the operative
materialized, gliding toward them from some shadow he'd used as cover while the mob roamed the streets. Not a mob, in fact, the operative told Szara later. Party men, some uniformed SS, an organized attack directed by the German state.

It was not the burning and the chaos that upset the operative, he was reasonably used to burning and chaos; it was Dr. Julius Baumann,
OTTER,
an agent he was not supposed to know about, much less see, least of all to have in an automobile along with his case officer. This shattered unbreakable rules of every variety and set the man's face dancing with bureaucratic horror. He did the best he could under the circumstances: secreted Baumann in the trunk, first prying back a section of the metal jamb to make an air passage. Szara quietly protested as he slid into the front seat. “Be glad I'm doing that much,” said the operative.

“He may have had a heart attack,” Szara said.

The operative shrugged. “He will be cared for.”

They drove a little way back toward Berlin, crossed the Havel on a narrow, deserted bridge, then turned north, swinging around Wittenau and moving east, through the back of the Berlin suburbs. It was artful navigation, evidently from memory, a slow but steady progress through the winding lanes of Hermsdorf, Lubans, Blankenfelde and Niederschonhausen, where villas and workshops faded into farmland or forest. It was almost four in the morning when they reached Pankow. And here the operative took a complicated route that brought them to the
Bahnhof.
He disappeared into the station for a few minutes and used the public telephone in the waiting room. Then east again, Weissensee and eventually Lichtenburg, where they drove through a very aristocratic part of town, swerving suddenly into the parklike courtyard of a private hospital, the gate closing automatically behind them. The operative opened the trunk and helped Baumann into the hospital. He would receive medical attention, the operative explained to Szara, but they'd decided to hide him there whether he needed it or not.

Heinrich Müller's teleprinter message had ordered, along with attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses throughout Germany, the arrest of twenty to thirty thousand Jews: “Wealthy Jews in particular are to be selected.” This meant money, which the Nazis especially
liked. So, said the operative as they pulled away from the hospital, they needed to put
OTTER
somewhere he wouldn't be found, else he would be taken to Buchenwald or Dachau, stripped of all assets, and eventually deported.

As they turned back toward Berlin, they drove through streets that sparkled with shattered glass—Szara later learned that fifty percent of the annual plate glass production of Belgium, the manufacturing center for German glass, had been smashed. At times the traffic police, after checking their Russian identity papers, would steer them politely around the damage. And here and there they saw things: Jewish men and boys crawling around in the street or capering in the town pond, cheered on by hooting SS troopers and local Nazis. Szara knew them well enough; schoolyard bullies, beer-hall fat boys, unpleasant little men with insulted faces, the same trash you would find in any town in Russia, or indeed anywhere at all.

The operative was no Jew. From his accent Szara guessed he might have origins in Byelorussia, where pogroms had been a way of life for centuries, but the events of 10 November had enraged him. And he swore. His thick hands gripped the wheel in fury and his face was red as a beet and he simply never stopped swearing. Long, foul, vicious Russian curses, the language of a land where the persecutors had always, somehow, remained just beyond the reach of the persecuted, which left you bad words and little else. Eventually, as a gray dawn lightened Berlin and ash drifted gently down on the immaculate streets, they reached the Adlon, where Szara was instructed to use a servants entrance and a back stairway.

By then the operative had said it all, virtually without repeating himself, having covered Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and Heydrich, Nazis, Germans one and all, their wives and children, their grandparents and forebears back to the Teutonic tribes, their weisswurst and kartoffel, dachshunds and schnauzers, pigs and geese, and the very earth upon which Germany stood: urged to sow its fucking self with salt and burn fallow for eternity.

11 November.

By dusk the weather had turned bitter cold and it was like ice in
Benno Ault's studio. There was little heat in the Iron Exchange Building at night; the owners maintained a certain commercial fiction, pretending that their tenants, like normal business people, hurried home after dark to the warmth of home and family. But Szara suspected that the blind piano tuner, the astrologer, in fact many of the resident shadows, both worked and lived in their offices.

Marta Haecht was asleep in the bed fitted into an alcove at one end of the studio, warm beneath a mound of feather quilts that rose and fell with her steady breathing. A dreamless sleep, he suspected. Untroubled. When he'd arrived, just after dusk, the street cleaners were still at it in the Bischofstrasse; he could hear them sweeping up the broken glass and dumping it in metal garbage cans.

A blanket pulled over his shoulders, he sat on the green sofa, smoked cigarettes, and stared out the tall window. His ankle burned beneath the handkerchief he'd tied over the gash, but that wasn't what kept him awake. It was a coldness that had nothing to do with the building. He'd seen it that morning, in his room at the Adlon, when he'd looked in the mirror. His face seemed white and featureless, almost dead, the expression of a man who no longer concerns himself with what the world might see when it looked at him. Marta's breathing changed, the quilt stirred, then everything was again peaceful.
A healthy animal,
he thought. She'd been only briefly disturbed by the events of what they called Kristallnacht. Night of glass. A clever name, like the Night of the Long Knives, when Roehm and his Brown Shirts were murdered in 1934. Not just knives—those were for brawling sailors and thieves—but
long
knives. A mythic dimension. “This is Goebbels's work,” she'd said, shaking her head at the sorry brutality of bad elements. Then she'd closed the door on it, coaxing him to her, twining herself around him, refusing to consider the possibility of the poison reaching either of them.

But it was Tscherova, the actress, who occupied his thoughts. The second secretary, Varin, and the nameless operative. The war they fought. He'd been contacted at the Adlon and told in no uncertain terms to get out of Germany and go back to Paris. His train left in the morning and he would be on it. He looked at his watch.

After 2:30. It
was
the morning—in seven hours he'd be gone. He'd not told Marta Haecht, not yet, he didn't know why. He wouldn't be able to explain convincingly, but that was only part of it. He wished to keep her in his mind a certain way, without tears or, worse, dry-eyed and cool. He treasured the memory of her as she'd been—the girl who thought that deep down she was perhaps Italian, Mediterranean, softer and finer than the stiff, northern people she lived among. The girl in the falling snow.

He stood and walked to the window. By the light of the street lamps he could see a boarded-up shop window down Bischofstrasse; yesterday a toy shop, evidently a Jewish toy shop. In a nearby doorway he caught a momentary pinpoint of red. A cigarette. Was this for him? Some poor bastard freezing through a long night of surveillance? An SD operative? Or somebody from Von Polanyi's
Amt 9,
perhaps. Making sure their secret communication line into Dzerzhinsky Square came to no harm so that Moscow continued to believe whatever Berlin wanted it to believe. Or was it a Russian down there—or a German described as
nasch
—some operative sent to make sure nothing happened to him on Berlin territory—
let him screw her, he leaves in the morning.