Dark Star (34 page)

Or was it just a man smoking a cigarette in a doorway.

“Can't you sleep?” She was propped on one elbow, hair thick and wild. “Come and keep warm,” she pouted, folding back the quilts as an invitation.

“In a minute,” he said. He didn't want to be warm, to fold himself around her sweetly curved back; he didn't want to make love. He wanted to think. Like the self-absorbed man he knew he was, he wanted to stay cold and think. He remembered a nursemaid in a little park in Ostend.
Come escape with me.
Marta flopped over on one side and grumbled as she pulled up the bedding. Soon her breathing changed to the rhythm of sleep.

He didn't want her to know he was leaving—it was better simply to disappear. He saw a scrap of paper she used for a marker in the book she was reading—Saint-Exupéry, of all things; no, that was right—and retrieved a pen from the pocket of his jacket.
Dearest love,
he wrote,
I had to go away this morning.
Then he signed it
André.
He doubted he'd see her again, not while the war between
Moscow and Berlin went on. He'd caught himself earlier in the evening in the midst of a certain kind of speculation:
Her boss, Herr Hanau, owns ships. What cargoes do they carry and where do they go?
No, he told himself; he wasn't going to let it come to that. Hard enough to report the truth about Baumann to Goldman or Abramov and keep her name out of it. Really very difficult, but he would find a way. Whether they loved each other or not they were lovers, and he was damned if he'd see her sucked into this brutal business.

“What are you writing?”

“Something to remember,” he said, and put the scrap of paper back in her book, hiding his hands behind a vase of flowers on the table. “I thought you'd gone back to sleep,” he added.

“I fooled you,” she said.

11
November.

Strasbourg.

It was well after eleven
A.M.
—the official minute of the armistice of the 1914 war, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—when Szara's train crossed the border but the train's engineer was French, thus not a man to permit clocks to interfere with honor. Many of the passengers on the train got off when notified by the conductors that a three-minute observance would be held on French soil. Szara left with them, stood beneath a rich blue sky in a fresh breeze, held his hand against his heart and meant it. A few kilometers of trees and fields, yet another world: the smell of frying butter, the sound of sputtering car engines, the look in women's eyes; France. Mentally, he was down on his knees at the foot of a wind-whipped Tricolor and kissing the earth. It was as though the passage across the border had severed a tangled knot in his heart and he could breathe again.

By the time he pushed open the shutters in his musty apartment and welcomed himself back to his courtyard—busy, loud, and smelly as always—Germany seemed like a land of apparitions, a dream, a play. It made no logical sense—truly he believed that people were people—but his instinctive sense of the world told a very
different story. He leaned on the windowsill, closed his eyes, and let Paris wash over him.

The
apparat
did not leave him to his pleasures for long—an hour later Odile was at his door to tell him he was expected at Stefan Leib's shop in Brussels that same night. Dutifully he took the train up to Belgium. Goldman shook his hand, welcomed him back like a hero, locked the door, and pulled down the shades.

If they'd given him a little room to breathe, things might have turned out differently; he would have shaped and crafted a functional deception and told them the part of the truth they needed to know: they had a compromised agent in Berlin. Not necessarily— Baumann and Von Polanyi could, at the Kaiserhof, have been discussing the price of pears, or Amt 9 might be the section of the Foreign Office that ordered clothes hangers from wire manufacturers.

But as a rule what you got in the intelligence business was a protruding corner, almost never the whole picture. That nearly always had to be inferred. But it was enough of a corner and Szara knew it. Von Polanyi was an intelligence officer; Herr Hanau seemed to have said so, Vainshtok had more or less confirmed it, and that was certainly more than enough to set the dogs running. Other sources would be tapped—you had the corner, somebody else had the top of the frame, a file already held the name of the artist, a local critic would be sent in to steal the dried paint off the palette. Result: full portrait with provenance.
Funkspiele.
Playback.

He had quite a bit, actually. For instance, the Germans were playing Dr. Baumann in a very effective way. They didn't have him sneaking around dead-drops at midnight or playing host to journalists who climbed over his garden wall; they took him for an excellent lunch at the best hotel. Really, there was a lot Szara could have told them, more than enough. From there, they could have either declared Baumann innocent or turned the game back around on the Germans.

But he would not give them Marta Haecht, he would not compromise himself, he would not permit them to own him that completely. And if you were going to report pillow talk, because that's
exactly what they called it and that's exactly what it was, you had to put a name and address to the head on the pillow.

So Szara lied. A lie of omission—the hard kind to discover. And in a way Goldman abetted the lie. With the death of Sénéschal, one of the Paris networks wasn't all that productive, because there was no realistic way to regain control of Lötte Huber, and she'd been the star of the show. This had the effect of expanding Baumann's importance to the stature of the
OPAL
network itself, and Goldman as
rezident
was neither more nor less important than the network he ran. There was competition anywhere you cared to look; hundreds of networks spread out all over Europe, Asia, and America, every one of them run by an officer of the GRU or the NKVD who wanted success, promotion, the usual prizes. So Goldman wanted to hear everything—especially everything good for Goldman.

Szara described Baumann truthfully: gray, suddenly old, under frightful tension.

“It could not be otherwise,” Goldman said sympathetically.

“He almost died at the second meeting,” Szara pointed out.

“Do you know that for a fact? ”

“No. It was my impression.”

“Ah.”

This information produced from Goldman a reminiscence of Spain. Some poor soul infiltrated into the Falange in 1936, when the Republican side still had a chance to win the war. “He too was gray,” Goldman mused. “He too suffered. The pressure of living a double life consumed him—the Bulgarian case officer watched it happen—and he died in Paris a year later.” Of what? Nobody was really sure. But Goldman and others believed it was the strain and constant danger of duplicity that finished him. And Baumann was not
proniknoveniya,
an agent in the heart of the enemy camp, as the man in Spain had been. “I appreciate the problem, really I do,” Goldman said. “Just servicing a drop is enough to make some men quake with terror. From one personality to the next, courage is eternally a variable, but it is our job, André Aronovich, to make them heroes, to give them heart.”

Thus Goldman.

An attitude sharply confirmed when Szara offered warm news of Tscherova. “She is for the cause,” Szara said. “I know she was coerced, originally—induced and threatened and paid and what you like. Things have changed, however. An émigré from Russia she may be, but she is no émigré from human decency. And the Nazis themselves, by being as they are, have made us a gift of her soul.”

“What did she look like, exactly?” Goldman asked.

But Szara wasn't falling for that. “Tall and thin. Plain—for an actress. I suppose the greasepaint and the stage lighting might make her attractive to an audience, but up close it's another story.”

“Does she play the romantic lead? ”

“No. Maids.”

“Aside from the work, do you suppose she's promiscuous?”

“I don't believe so, she's not really the type. She claims to have had a lover or two in Berlin, but I believe most of that has actually been done by her associates. She is constantly around it, and she is no saint, but neither is she the devil she pretends to be. If I were you, I'd direct Schau-Wehrli to handle her carefully and to make sure nothing happens to her. She's valuable, and certainly worth protection, whatever it takes.”

Goldman nodded appreciatively. He seemed, Szara thought, more and more like Stefan Leib as time went by: hair a little too long, corduroy jacket shapeless and faded, the introverted cartographer, absentminded, surrounded by his tattered old maps. “And Germany? ” he asked.

“In a word?”

“If you like.”

“An abomination.”

Goldman's mask slipped briefly and Szara had a momentary view of the man beneath it. “We shall settle with them this time, and in a way they will not forget,” he said softly. “The world will yet thank God for Joseph Stalin.”

With Kristallnacht, a kind of shiver passed through Paris. The French had their own problems: communists and the Comintern, the fascist Croix de Feu, conspiracy and political actions among the
various émigré groups, strikes and riots, bank failures and scandals— all against a deafening drumbeat from the Senate and the ministries. Stripped of all the rhetoric, it came out
trouble in Germany and Russia, now what?
They'd not really gotten over the Great War— there was a political sophism afoot that the French did not die well, that they loved life a little more than they should. But in the 1914 war they had died anyhow, and in great numbers. And for what? Because now, twenty years later, the trouble was back, three hundred miles east of Paris.

Troubles from the east were nothing new. Napoleon's experiment in Russia hadn't gone at all well, and with the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, Russian squadrons, among them the Preobajansky Guard, had occupied Paris. But the French were never quite as defeated as you thought they were; the Russians had, in time, gone home, bearing with them various French maladies of which two proved ultimately to be chronic: unquenchable appetites for champagne and liberty, the latter eventually leading to the Decembrist uprising of 1825—the first in a series of revolutions ending in 1917.

But the present trouble from the east was German trouble, and the French could think of nothing worse. Burned in 1870 and scorched in 1914, they prayed it would go away. Hitler was such a
cul,
with his little mustache and his little strut; nobody wanted to take him seriously. But Kristallnacht was serious, broken glass and broken heads, and Frenchmen knew in their stomachs what that meant no matter what the politicians said. They tried to maneuver diplomatically with Stalin, figuring that with an alliance on either side of Hitler they could crush the shitty little weasel between them. But, maneuvering with Stalin … You thought you had it all agreed and then something always just seemed to go wrong.

The days grew shorter and darker but the bistros did not grow brighter—not this year they didn't. The fog swirled along the rue du Cherche-Midi and Szara sometimes went home with the carefree girls from the cafés, but it never made him all that happy. He thought it would, each time—oh, that strawberry blond hair and those freckles—but only the usual things happened. He missed
being in love—definitely he missed that—but winter 1938 didn't seem to be the season for it. So he told himself.

Life ground on.

Baumann reported obediently, milling more swage wire every month as the bombers rolled out of the Reich factories.

Or maybe didn't.

Or maybe did even more than Moscow knew.

The lawyer Valais,
HECTOR,
picked up a new agent, a mercenary Bavarian corporal called Gettig who assisted one of the German military attachés. Odile's husband ran off with a little Irish girl who worked in a milliner's sewing room. Kranov now wore a thick sweater in the cold upstairs room on the rue Delesseux and stolidly punched away at the W/T key: the eternal Russian peasant in the technological age. To Szara he became a symbol, as the journalist for the first time saw
OPAL
clearly for what it was: a bureaucratic institution in the business of stealing and transmitting information. It was Kranov who handed Szara the decoded flimsy announcing the accession of Lavrenti Beria to the chairmanship of the NKVD. The official triumph of the Georgian
khvost
meant little to Szara at the time; it was simply one more manifestation of a bloody darkness that had settled on the world. When Beria cleaned the last of the Old Bolsheviks out of high positions in the intelligence
apparat,
the purge ended.

In the middle of December they came at him again—this time from a different angle, and this time they meant it.

A stiff, creamy envelope addressed to him, by hand, at the
Pravda
bureau, the sort of thing journalists sometimes got.
Le Cercle Rénaissance invites you …
A square of clear cellophane slipped from within the card and floated to the floor at his feet. He didn't bite the first time so they tried him again—just before Christmas when nobody in Paris has enough invitations—and this time somebody took a Mont Blanc pen and wrote
Won't you please come?
below the incised lettering.

It meant the barber and it meant the dry cleaner and it meant a white shirt laundered to the consistency of teak—expensive indignities
to which he submitted in the vain, vain hope that the invitation was precisely what it said it was. He checked the organization, the Renaissance Club; it did exist, and it was extremely exclusive. One of the excluded, a guest at a gallery opening, shot an eyebrow when he heard the name and said, “You are very fortunate to be asked there,” with sincere and visible loathing in his expression.

The address was in Neuilly, home to some of the oldest and quietest money in France. The street, once the frantic taxi driver managed to find it, was a single row of elegant three-story houses protected by wrought-iron palings, discreetly obscured by massed garden foliage—even in December—and bathed in a satin light by Victorian street lamps. The other side of the street was occupied by a private park, to which residents received a key, and beyond that lay the Seine.