Dark Star (39 page)

“With discretion, Mr. Fitzware, it's entirely possible.”

An unspoken question answered: Fitzware was not in communication with the USSR, was not being drawn into the occluded maze of diplomatic initiatives achieved by intelligence means. He was in communication with André Szara, a Soviet journalist operating on his own. That was the meaning of the word
discretion.
Fitzware considered carefully; matters had reached a delicate point. “Your terms,” he said.

“I have great anxiety on the question of Palestine, particularly with the St. James's Conference in session.”

At this, Fitzware's triumphant mood slightly deflated. Szara could not have raised a more difficult issue. “There
are
easier areas in which we might work,” he said.

Szara nodded, leaving Fitzware to tread water.

“Can you be specific?” Fitzware said at last.

“Certificates of Emigration.”

“Real ones?”

“Yes.”

“Above the legal limit, of course.”

“Of course.”

“And in return?”

“Determination of the Reich's monthly bomber production. Based on the total manufacture of the cold-process swage wire that operates certain nonelectronic aircraft controls.”

“My board of directors will want to know the reason you say ‘total.' ”

“
My
board of directors believes this to be the case. It is, whatever else one might say, Mr. Fitzware, a very good, a very
effective,
board of directors.”

Fitzware sighed in agreement. “Don't suppose, dear boy, you'd consider taking something simple, like money.”

“No.”

“Another Cognac, then.”

“With pleasure.”

“We have a good deal of work yet to do, and I can't promise anything. All the usual, you understand,” Fitzware said, pressing the button on the wall that summoned a waiter.

“I understand perfectly,” Szara said. He paused to finish his Cognac. “But you must understand that time is very important to us. People are dying, Great Britain needs friends, we must make it all work out somehow. If you will save lives for us, we will save lives for you. Surely that's world peace, or damn close to it.”

“Close enough,” Fitzware said.

In the violent, changeable weather of early March, Szara and Fitzware got down to serious negotiation. “Call it what you like,” Szara was later to tell de Montfried, “but what it was was pushcart haggling.” Fitzware played all the traditional melodies: it was his board of directors that wanted something for nothing; the mandarins
in Whitehall were a pack of blind fools; he, Fitzware, was entirely on Szara's side, but making headway through the bureaucratic underbrush was unspeakably frustrating.

Much of the negotiating was done at the Brasserie Heininger. Fitzware sat with Lady Angela Hope and Voyschinkowsky and the whole crowd. Sometimes Szara joined them, other times he took one of his café girls out for dinner. He would meet Fitzware in the men's WC, where they would whisper urgently back and forth, or they would go out on the sidewalk for a breath of fresh air. Once or twice they talked in a corner at the social evenings held in various apartments. Over the course of it, Szara realized that being a Jew made bargaining difficult. Fitzware was eternally proper, but there were moments when Szara thought he caught a whiff of the classical attitude: why are you people so difficult, so greedy, so stubborn?

And of course Fitzware's board of directors tried to do to him what his own Directorate had done to Dr. Julius Baumann. Who are we really dealing with? they wanted to know. We need to have a sense of the process; where is the information coming from? More, give us more! (And why are
you people
so greedy?)

But Szara was like a rock. He smiled at Fitzware tolerantly, knowingly, as the Englishman went fishing for deeper information, a smile that said,
We're in the same business, my friend.
Finally, Szara made a telling point: this negotiation is nothing, he admitted ruefully to Fitzware, compared to dealings with the French, who had their own Jewish communities in Beirut and Damascus. That seemed to work. Nothing, in love and business, quite like a rival to stimulate desire.

They struck a deal and shook hands.

Baumann's figures, from 1 January 1937 through February 1939, brought an initial payment of five hundred Certificates of Emigration—up from Fitzware's offer of two hundred, down from Szara's demand for seven hundred. One hundred and seventy-five certificates a month would be provided as the information was exchanged thereafter. The White Paper would produce seventy-five thousand legal entries through 1944, fifteen thousand a year, one thousand two hundred and fifty a month. Szara's delivery of intelligence
from Germany would increase that number by a factor of fourteen percent.
Thus the mathematics of Jewish lives,
he thought.

He told himself again and again that the operation had to be run with a cold heart, told himself to accept a small victory, told himself whatever he could think of, yet he could not avoid the knowledge that his visits to the corner
tabac
seemed much more frequent, his ashtrays overflowed, he took more empty bottles to the garbage can in the courtyard, his bistro bills rose sharply, and he ate aspirin and splashed gallons of cold water on his eyes in the morning.

There was too much to think about: for one, unseen Soviet counterintelligence work that was meant to keep people like him from doing exactly what he was doing; for another, the potential for blackmail come the day when Fitzware wanted a view of Soviet operations in Paris and threatened to denounce him if he refused to cooperate; for a third, the strong possibility that Baumann's information was in fact supplied by the Reich Foreign Office intelligence unit and would in time poison the British estimate of German armaments. What, he wondered, were they hearing on the subject from other sources? He was to find that out, sooner than he thought.

During this period, Szara found consolation in the most unlikely places. March, he discovered, was good spying weather. Something about the fierce skies full of racing clouds or the spring rains blowing slantwise past his window gave him courage—in a climate of turbulence one could put aside thoughts of consequences. The political parties of the left and the right were to be seen daily on the boulevards, bellowing their slogans, waving their banners, and the newspapers were frantic, with thick black headlines every morning. The Parisians had a certain facial expression: lips compressed, head canted a little to one side, eyebrows raised: It meant
where does all this lead? and
implied
no place very good.
In Paris that spring of 1939, one saw it hourly.

De Montfried, meanwhile, had appointed himself official agent runner. He was no Abramov and no Bloch, but he had long experience as a commercial trader and believed he understood intuitively how any business agent should be handled. This assumption
produced, in the hushed railroad library of the Renaissance Club, some extraordinary moments. De Montfried offering money—“Please don't be eccentric about this, it is only the means to an end”—which Szara did not care to take. De Montfried in the guise of a Jewish mother, pressing smoked fish sandwiches on a man who could barely stand to look at a cup of coffee. De Montfried handed a stack of five hundred Certificates of Emigration, clearing his throat, playing the stoic with tears of pleasure in his eyes. None of this mattered. The days of Abramov and Bloch were over; Szara had been running
OPAL
operations for too long not to run his own when the time came. That included making sure he didn't know too much about details that did not directly concern him.

But de Montfried said just enough so that Szara's imagination managed the rest. He could see them, perhaps an eye surgeon from Leipzig with his family or a tottering, old rabbi from Berlin's Hasid community, could see them boarding a steamer, watching the coastline of Germany disappear over the horizon. Life for them would be difficult, more than difficult, in Palestine. What the Nazi Brown Shirts had started the Arab raiding bands might yet finish, but it was at least a chance, and that was better than despair.

The British operatives provided all the usual paraphernalia: a code name,
CURATE,
an emergency meeting signal—the same “wrong number” telephone call the Russians sometimes used—and a contact to be known by the work name Evans. This was a rail-thin gentleman in his sixties, from his bearing almost certainly a former military officer, quite possibly of colonial service, who dressed in chalk-stripe blue suits, carried a furled umbrella, cultivated a natty little white mustache, and stood straight as a stick. Contacts were made in the afternoon, in the grand cinemas of the Champs-Élysées neighborhood: silent exchanges of two folded copies of
Le Temps
placed on an empty seat between Szara and the British contact.

Silent but for, on one occasion, a single sentence, spoken by Evans across the empty seat and suitably muffled by the clatter of a crowd of Busby Berkeley tap dancers on the screen: “Our friend
wants you to know that your numbers have been confirmed, and that he is grateful.” He was not to hear Evans speak again.

Confirmed?

That meant Baumann was telling the truth; his information had been authenticated by other sources reporting to the British services. And that meant, what? That Dr. Baumann was betraying a German
Funkspiele
operation, all by himself and just because? That Marta Haecht's boss had been mistaken: it wasn't Von Polanyi having lunch with Baumann at the Kaiserhof ? Szara could have gone on and on; there were whole operas of possibilities to be drawn from Fitzware's message. But there was no time for it.

Szara had to hurry back to his apartment, hide a hundred and seventy-five certificates under the carpet until they could be delivered to de Montfried that evening, make a five
P.M.
meeting in the third arrondissement, the Marais, then head out to the place d'Italie for a
treff
with Valais, the new group leader of the
SILO
network, a little after seven.

The meeting in the Marais took place in a tiny hotel, at an oilcloth-covered table in a darkened room. A week earlier, Szara had been offered his very own emigration certificate to Palestine. “It's a back door out of Europe,” de Montfried had said. “The time may come when you'll have no other choice.” Szara had politely but firmly declined. There was no doubt a reason he did this, but it wasn't one he wanted to name. What he did ask of de Montfried was a second identity, a good one, with a valid passport that would take him over any border he cared to cross. His intention was not flight. Rather, like any efficient predator, he simply sought to extend his range. De Montfried, his favors refused again and again, was eager to oblige. “Our cobbler,” he'd said, using the slang expression for forger, “is the best in Europe. And I'll arrange to have him paid, you're not even to discuss it.”

The cobbler was nameless; a fat, oily man with thinning curls brushed back from a receding hairline. In a soiled white shirt buttoned at the sleeves, he moved slowly around the room, speaking
French in an accent Szara could place only generally, somewhere in Central Europe. “You've brought a photograph?” he said. Szara handed over four passport pictures taken in a photo studio. The cobbler chuckled, chose one, and handed the rest back. “Myself, I don't keep records—for that you'll have to see the cops.”

He held a French passport between thick forefinger and thumb. “This,
this,
you don't see every day.” He sat down and flattened the passport out on the table and began removing its photograph by rubbing on chemical solvent with a piece of sponge. When he was done he handed the damp picture to Szara. “Jean Bonotte,” he said. The man looking back at him was vain, with humorous dark eyes that caught the light and a devil's beard that ran from sideburn tight along the jawline and then swept up to join the mustache, the sort of beard kept closely pruned, trimmed daily with a scissors. “Looks smart, no? ”

“He does.”

“Not so smart as he thought.”

“Italian?”

The cobbler shrugged eloquently. “Born Marseille. Could mean anything. A French citizen, though. That's important. Coming from down there you can always say you're Italian, or Corsican, or Lebanese. It's whatever you say, down there.”

“Why is it so good? ”

“Because it's real. Because Monsieur Bonotte will not come to the attention of the Spanish Guardia just about the time you get off the ferry in Algeciras. Because Monsieur Bonotte will not again come to anyone's attention, excepting Satan, but the police don't know anything about it. He's legally alive. This document is legally alive. You understand? ”

“And he's dead.”

“Very. What's the sense to talk, but you can have confidence he has left us and will not be dug up by some French farmer. That's why I say it's so good.”

The cobbler took the photo back, lit the corner with a match, and watched the blue-green flame consume the paper before he dropped it in a saucer. “Born in 1902. Makes him thirty-seven. Okay with you? The less I have to change the better.”

“What do you think?” Szara asked.

The cobbler drew his head back a little, evidently farsighted, and looked him over. “Sure. Why not? Life's hard sometimes and we show it in the face.”

“Then leave it as it is.”

The cobbler began to glue Szara's photo to the paper. When he was done, he waddled over to a bureau and returned with a stamper, a franking machine that pressed paper into raised letters. “The real thing,” he said proudly. He placed the device at a precise angle to the photo, then slid a scrap of cardboard atop the part of the page already incised. He pressed hard for a few seconds, then released the device. “This prevents falsification,” he said with only the slightest hint of a smile. He returned the franking device to the bureau and brought back a rubber stamp and a pad, a pen, and a small bottle of green ink. “Government ink,” he said. “Free for them. Expensive for me.” He concentrated himself, then stamped the side of the page firmly. “I'm renewing it for you,” he said. He dipped the pen into the ink and signed the space provided in the rubber-stamped legend. “Prefect Cormier himself,” he said. He applied a blotter to the signature, then looked at it critically and blew on the ink to make sure it was dry. He handed the passport to Szara. “Now you're a French citizen, if you aren't already.”