Dark Star (4 page)

He touched the baggage receipt in the inside pocket of his jacket for the tenth time that day; he might have taken yet one more look at the thing, but the sound of the train was suddenly amplified as the door to his compartment swung open.

On first glance, an ordinary businessman of Central Europe in dark overcoat and soft-brimmed hat, carrying a buckled briefcase of the kind that is held under one arm. Then, recognition. This was a man to whom he had been briefly introduced, perhaps a year earlier, at some Moscow function he couldn't recall. His name was Bloch, a lieutenant general of the GRU, military intelligence, and recently, according to rumor, the illegal—clandestine—
rezident
operating GRU and NKVD networks based in Tarragona. Thus a very senior member of the Soviet cadre involved in the Spanish Civil War.

Szara was immediately on his guard; powerful people in Moscow were afraid of this man. It was nothing specific. Those who knew the details didn't tell war stories, but they veered away from his name when it came up in conversation, looked around to see who might be listening, made a certain gesture of the face that meant
stay away.
What little was said about Bloch implied an insatiable appetite for success—an appetite gratified by means of ferocious tyranny. Life for those assigned to work for him was said to be a nightmare.

Yaschyeritsa, they called him behind his back, a kind of lizard. Because he had the look of the basilisk: a sharp triangular face, stiff hair combed back flat from the forehead, thin eyebrows angled steeply toward the inner corners of his eyes, which, long and narrow, were set above hard cheekbones that slanted upward.

André Szara, like everyone who moved in those circles known as the
nomenklatura,
the elite, was an adroit reader of faces. You had to know who you were dealing with. A Byelorussian? An Armenian? A native Russian? With Jews, it was often difficult because Jewish women had for centuries borne the children of their tormentors and thus carried the genes of many races. God only knew, Szara thought, what brutal band of marauders had forced themselves on Bloch's female ancestor to make him look as he did. Did evil, he wondered, travel in the blood as well?

Bloch nodded a greeting, sat down across from Szara, leaned over and locked the compartment door, then turned off the lamps on the wall around the window. The train was moving slowly through a village, and from the darkened compartment they could see that a local festival was in progress; a bonfire in the public square, cattle wearing garlands, Hitler Youth in shorts holding swastika banners hung lengthwise down long poles, like Roman fasces.

Bloch stared intently at the scene. “At last,” he said pensively, “they are back in the Middle Ages.” He turned his attention to Szara. “Forgive me, comrade journalist, I am General Y I. Bloch. I don't think we've ever spoken, but I read your work when I have a moment, so I know who you are. Do I need to tell you who I am? ”

“No, comrade General. I know you are with the special services.”

Bloch acknowledged Szara's awareness as a compliment: a knowing smile, a brief inclination of the head,
at your service.

“Tell me,” the general said, “is it true you've been away from Moscow for a time? Several months?”

“Since late August,” Szara said.

“No easy life—trains and hotel rooms. Slow steamships. But foreign capitals are certainly more amusing than Moscow, so there are compensations. No? ”

This was a trap. There was a doctrinal answer, something to do with
building socialism,
but Bloch was no fool and Szara suspected a pious response would embarrass them both. “It's true,” he said, adding, “though one gets tired of being the eternal stranger,” just in case.

“Do you hear the Moscow gossip? ”

“Very little,” Szara said. A loner, he tended to avoid the Tass and
Pravda
crowd on the circuit of European capitals.

Bloch's face darkened. “This has been a troubled autumn for the services, surely you've heard that much.”

“Of course I see the newspapers.”

“There is more, much more. We've had defections, serious ones. In the last few weeks, Colonel Alexander Orlov and Colonel Walter Krivitsky, who is called general in the European press, have left the service and sought refuge in the West. The Krivitsky matter has been made public, also the flight of the operative Reiss. As for Orlov, we'll keep that to ourselves.”

Szara nodded obediently. This had quickly become a very sensitive conversation. Orlov—a cover name within the service, he was in fact Leon Lazarevich Feldbin—and Krivitsky—Samuel Ginsberg— were important men, respectively NKVD and GRU officials of senior status. The Ignace Reiss affair had shocked him when he read about it. Reiss, murdered in Switzerland as he attempted to flee, had been a fervent idealist, a Marxist/Leninist in his bones.

“Friends?” Bloch raised an eyebrow.

“I knew Reiss to say hello to. No more than that.”

“And you? How does it go with you? ” Bloch was concerned, almost fatherly. Szara wanted to laugh, had the services been panicked into
kindness?

“My work is difficult, comrade General, but less difficult than that of many others, and I am content to be what I am.”

Bloch absorbed his answer and nodded to himself. “So you march along,” he said. “There are some,” he continued pensively, “who find themselves deeply disturbed by the arrests, the trials. We cannot deny it.”

Oh cannot we?
“We've always had enemies, within and without. I served in the civil war, from 1918 to 1920, and fought against the Poles. It isn't for me to judge the operations of state security forces.”

Bloch sat back in his seat. “Very well put,” he said after a time. Then his voice softened, just barely audible above the steady rumble of the train. “And should it come your turn? Then what?”

Szara could not quite see Bloch's face in the shadow of the seat across from him, the countryside was dark, the light from the corridor dim. “Then that is how it will be,” Szara said.

“You are a fatalist.”

“What else?” They lingered there a moment too long for Szara. “I have no family,” he added.

Bloch seemed to nod at that, a gesture of agreement with a point made or a confirmation of something he believed. “Not married,” he mused. “I would have guessed otherwise.”

“I am a widower, comrade General. My wife died in the civil war. She was a nurse, in Berdichev.”

“So you are alone,” Bloch said. “Some men, in such circumstances, might be careless of their lives, since nothing holds them to the world. Unconcerned with consequence, such men rise to an opportunity, sacrifice themselves, perhaps to cure their nation of a great evil. And then we have—why not say it? A hero! Do I have it right? Is this your view?”

A man and a woman—she had just said something that made him laugh—went by in the corridor. Szara waited until they passed. “I am like everybody else,” he said.

“No,” Bloch said. “You are not.” He leaned forward, his face taut, concentrated. “To be a writer, that requires work. Work and sacrifice. And the determination to follow a certain road, wherever it may lead. Remember that, comrade journalist, whatever might happen in the days ahead.”

Szara started to reply, to fend off a version of himself he found grandiose, but Bloch raised a hand for silence. The gesture was casual enough, but it struck Szara dumb. The general stood and unlatched the door, stared at Szara a moment, a look that openly weighed and calculated, then left the compartment abruptly, closing the door firmly behind him and disappearing down the passageway.

Some time later, the train halted at Ulm. The station platform was a lacework of shadows, and raindrops refracted trails of light as they rolled down the compartment window. A figure with a hat and an underarm briefcase hurried across the platform and entered the passenger door of a black Grosser Mercedes—an automobile often used by Reich officials—which sped away from the railroad station and was soon lost in the darkness.

A hero?

No, Szara thought. He knew better. He'd learned that lesson in war.

At the age of twenty-three, in 1920, he had campaigned with Marshal Tukachevsky, writing dispatches and inspirational stories for the home front, much as the writer Babel—a Jew who rode with Cossack cavalry—had served General Budenny. In the midst of the war against Poland, the Soviet forces had been driven back from Warsaw, from the banks of the Vistula, by an army commanded by General Pilsudski and his adviser, the French general Weygand. Szara's squadron, during the retreat, had been set upon by Ukrainian bandits, a remnant of the Petlyura army that had occupied Kiev. Attacked from the ridge of a hillside, and outnumbered, they had fought like men possessed, all of them—cooks, clerks, wagon-masters, and military correspondents. For the previous day they'd come upon the body of a Polish colonel, stripped bare, tied by one
foot to a high tree branch, the impaling stake protruding from between his legs. The Ukrainian bands fought both sides, Poles and Russians, and God help anyone they took alive.

From horseback, Szara had ridden down one man, slashed at another with his saber. In the next instant he and his horse were down in the dust, the horse whinnying in pain and terror, its legs thrashing. Szara rolled frantically away from the animal, then a smiling man walked toward him, a small dagger in his hand. Horses galloped past them, there were shots and screams and pointless shouted commands, but this man, in cap and overcoat, never stopped smiling. Szara crawled on all fours, a horse leapt over him and its rider cursed, but he could gain no ground. The battle that raged around them mattered not to Szara nor, apparently, to his good-humored pursuer. The smile was meant, he understood, to be reassuring, as though he were a pig in a sty. As the man closed on him he made a cooing sound and Szara came suddenly to his senses, fumbled his revolver loose of its holster, and fired wildly. Nothing happened. The smile broadened. Then Szara took hold of his fear, as though he could squeeze it in his fist, aimed like a marksman on a target range, and shot the man in the eye.

What he remembered later was not that he had fought bravely, he had simply decided that life mattered more than anything else in the world and had contrived to cling to it. In those years he had seen heroes, and how they went about their work, how they did what had to be done, and he knew he was not one of them.

The train was late getting into Prague. A Jewish family had attempted to board at Nürnberg, the last stop on German soil. Jews had been strongly “encouraged” to emigrate from Germany—not least by a hundred and thirty-five racial decrees, together entitled “The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor”—to whatever country would accept them. But the situation, Szara knew, was not unlike that under the czar: a bureaucratic spider web. While you could get Paper A stamped at the local police station, the stamp on Paper B, received from the Economic Ministry, was now out of date and would have to be applied for all
over again. Meanwhile, Paper A ran its term and automatically revoked itself.

The Jewish family at Nürnberg simply attempted to board the train, a pointless act of desperation. Thus young children, grandparents, mother and father, scampered in terror all around the station while policemen in leather coats chased them down, shouting and blowing whistles. Meanwhile, the passengers peered curiously from the train windows. Some, excited by the chase, tried to help, calling out, “There, under the baggage cart!” or “She's crossed the tracks!”

Just after midnight it was cold in Prague, there were frost flowers on the paving stones, but the hotel was not far from the station, and Szara was soon settled in his room. He stayed up for hours, smoking, writing notes on the margin of
Le Temps,
studying the baggage ticket he'd been given. He was being drawn into something he did not understand, but he had a strong intuition about what awaited him at the end of it.

This extramarital affair with the services had been simple in the beginning, five or six years earlier, for they'd used him as an intellectual, an agent of influence, and he'd liked it, found it flattering to be trusted. Now he had gotten in over his head, and he had no doubt it would kill him. They were using him for something important, an official operation of the
apparat
or, and here was the death sentence, the plotting of a cabal within it. He only knew it was very dark and very serious. Soviet generals of military intelligence did not board German trains to chat with writers.

Nonetheless, he refused to blind himself to the possibility of exits. He would die, he thought, but did not want to discover as he died that there had been, after all, a way out.
That is the difference, comrade General, between the hero and the survivor.
The hours of reflection revealed nothing, but did serve to dissipate tension and tire him out. He crawled into bed and slept without dreams.

He woke to a day of light snow and subtle terror in Prague. He saw nothing, felt everything. On the fifth of November, Hitler had made
a speech once again declaring the urgency, for Germany, of
Lebensraum,
the acquisition of new territory for German growth and expansion, literally “room to live.” Like an operatic tenor, singing counterpoint to Hitler's bass, Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans, pleaded publicly in an open letter carried by Czech newspapers the following day for a halt to Czech “persecution” of German minorities in the Sudetenland, the area bordering southern Germany. On 12 November the countertenor, Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, said on the radio: “Race and nationality, blood and soil, are the principles of National Socialist thought, we would be acting in contradiction if we attempted to assimilate a foreign nationality by force.”

This may have sounded warm and comforting in France, but the Sudeten Germans were not a foreign nationality, and neither were the Austrians—not according to German diplomatic definitions. Sudeten German representatives next staged a mass exodus from parliament, informing reporters waiting outside that they had been physically abused by Czech police.