Dark Star (42 page)

He passed a custom leathergoods store one day in the seventh arrondissement—saddles and riding boots in the window—and, on the spur of the moment, went inside. The owner was a Hungarian, a no-nonsense craftsman in a smock, his hands hard and knotted from years of cutting and stitching leather. Szara explained what he wanted, a kind of portmanteau like a doctor's bag, an old-fashioned but enduring form, made of long-wearing leather. The Hungarian nodded, produced some samples, and quoted an astonishing price. Szara agreed nonetheless. He hadn't wanted an
object
so badly for a long while. Oh, and one last thing: from time to time he carried confidential business papers, and what with the sort of people one finds working in hotels these days … The Hungarian was entirely understanding and indicated that Szara was not the only customer to express such concerns. The traditional false bottom was as old as the hills, true, but when properly crafted it remained effective. A second panel would be fashioned to fit precisely on the bottom; papers could be safely stored between the two layers.
“It is, sir, naturally safest if you were to have it sewn in place. Not so much for light-fingered hotel staff, you understand, for the bag will be provided with an excellent lock, but more a matter of, one might say, frontiers.” The delicate word hung in the air for a moment, then Szara made a deposit and promised to return in June.

A week later he decided that if he was to travel, he didn't want to leave the Jean Bonotte passport in his apartment. Robberies were rare but they did occur, especially when people went away for an extended period. And from time to time the NKVD might send a couple of technicians around, just to see whatever there was to see. So he opened an account in the Bonotte name, using the passport for identification, at a Banque du Nord office on the boulevard Haussmann, then rented a safe deposit box for the passport itself. Three days later he returned, on a perfect June morning, and put an envelope holding twelve thousand francs on top of the passport.
What are you doing?
he asked himself. But he really didn't know; he only knew he was uncomfortable, in some not very definable way, like a dog that howls on the eve of a tragedy. Something, somewhere, was warning him. His ancestry, perhaps. Six hundred years of Jewish life in Poland, of omens, signs, portents, instincts. His very existence proved him to be the child of generations that had survived when others didn't, perhaps born to know when the blood was going to run.
Hide money,
something told him.
Arm yourself,
said the same voice, a few nights later. But that, for the moment, he did not do.

A strange month, that June. Everything happened. Schau-Wehrli was contacted by a group of Czech émigrés who lived in the town of Saint-Denis, in the so-called Red Belt north of Paris. They were communists who'd fled when Hitler took over the remainder of Czechoslovakia in March, and the contact with
OPAL
was made through the clandestine apparatus of the French Communist party. The group was receiving intelligence by means of secret writing on the backs of bank envelopes, which contained receipts for funds mailed to Prague and Brno for the support of relatives. They were using an invisible ink concocted in a university chemistry laboratory. Like the classics, lemon juice and urine, application of a
hot iron brought up the message. The information itself was voluminous, ranging from Wehrmacht order of battle, numbers and strengths of German units, to financial data, apparently stolen by the same bank employees who prepared the envelopes, as well as industrial information—almost all the renowned Czech machine shops were now at work on Reich war production.

This group required a great deal of attention. There were eight of them, all related by blood or marriage, and though motivated by a passionate loathing of the Nazis, they perceived their contribution as a business and knew exactly what this kind of information was worth. Three of the Saint-Denis members had intelligence experience and had created a network in Czechoslovakia, after Hitler took the Sudetenland, with the goal of supporting themselves and their families when they resettled in France. The two bank employees were the daughters of sisters, first cousins, and their husbands worked at acquiring information through friendships maintained at men's sports clubs. Such an in-place network, already functioning efficiently, was almost too good to be true, thus the Directorate in Moscow was simultaneously greedy for the product and wary of Referat VI C counterintelligence deception. This ambivalence created a vast flow of cable traffic and exceptional demands on the time of the deputy director, Schau-Wehrli, so that Goldman eventually ordered the
RAVEN
network transferred to Szara's care.

He nodded gravely when given the new assignment, but the idea of working with Nadia Tscherova did not displease him. Not at all.

At the rue Delesseux he read his way through the
RAVEN
file, which included Tscherova's most recent reports in their original format: an aristocratic literary Russian printed in tiny letters, on strips of film that had been carried over the border in Odile's shoulder pads, then developed in an attic darkroom. Previous reports had been retyped, verbatim, and filed in sequence.

Szara read with pure astonishment. After the tense aridity of Dr. Baumann and the lawyer's precision of Valais, it was like a night at the theater. What an eye she had! Penetrating, malicious, ironic, as though Balzac were reborn as a Russian émigré in 1939 Berlin. Read serially,
RAVEN'S
reports worked as a novel of social commentary.
Her life was made up of small roles in bad plays, intimate dinners, lively parties, and country house weekends in the Bavarian forest, with boar hunting by day and bed hopping by night.

Szara had tender feelings for this woman, even though he suspected she was a specialist in the provocation of tender feelings, and he would have expected himself to read of her never-quite-consummated
liaisons intimes
with a leaden heart. But it just wasn't so. She'd told him the truth that night in her dressing room: she protected herself from the worst of it and was unmoved by what went on around her. This casual invulnerability was everywhere in her reports, and Szara found himself, above all else, amused. She had something of a man's mind in such matters, and she characterized her fumbling, half-drunken, would-be lovers and their complicated
requests
with a delicate brutality that made him laugh out loud. By God, he thought, she was no better than he was.

Nor did she spare her subagents. Lara Brozina she described as writing “a kind of ghastly, melancholy verse that Germans of a certain level adore.” Brozina's brother, Viktor Brozin, an actor in radio plays, was said to have “the head of a lion, the heart of a parakeet.” And of the balletmaster Anton Krafic she wrote that he was “sentenced every morning to live another day.” Szara could positively see them—the languid Krafic, the leonine Brozin, the
terribly
sensitive Brozina—amusing frauds making steady progress along the shady underside of Nazi society.

And Tscherova did not spare the details. During a weekend in a castle near the town of Traunstein, she entered a bathroom after midnight “to discover B. [that meant
BREWER,
Krafic] drinking champagne in the bathtub with SS Hauptsturmführer Bruckmann, who was wearing a cloche hat with a veil and carmine lipstick.” What in heaven's name, Szara wondered, had the Directorate made of
this?

Referring to the file of outgoing reports he discovered the answer: Schau-Wehrli had reprocessed the material to make it palatable. Thus her dispatch covering
RAVEN'S
description of the jolly bath said only that “
BREWER
reports that SS Hauptsturmführer
BRUCKMANN
has recently been with his regiment on divisional maneuvers in marshy, swamplike terrain near the Masurian Lakes in
East Prussia.” Another pointer, Szara noted, toward the invasion of Poland, where such conditions might be encountered.

A rich, rewarding file.

He worked his way through the last of it on the afternoon of the summer solstice,
the day the sun is said to pause,
he thought. Pleasing, that idea. Something Russian about it. As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down: the weather light and sunny, rather aimless, a bird twittering away on a neighboring balcony, Kranov coding at his desk, humming a Russian melody, the little bell on the door of the ground-floor
tabac
tinkling as a customer entered.

Then the warning buzzer went off beside Kranov's table—a danger signal operated from beneath the counter in the
tabac.
This was followed, a moment later, by a knock on the door at the bottom of the stairs, a door shielded by a curtain on the back wall of the shop.

Szara had absolutely no idea what to do, neither did Kranov. They both froze, sat dead still like two hares caught in a winter field. They were literally surrounded by incrimination—files, flimsies, stolen documents, and the wireless telegraph itself, with its aerial run cleverly up the unused chimney by way of the attic. There was no getting rid of anything. They could have run down the stairs and rushed out the back door, or jumped the three stories and broken their ankles, but they did neither. It was three-thirty on a bright summer afternoon and not a wisp of darkness to cover their escape.

So they sat there and presently heard a second knock, perhaps a bit more insistent than the first. Szara, not knowing what else to do, walked down the stairs and answered it. To find two Frenchmen waiting politely at the door. They were Frenchmen of a certain class, wore tan summerweight suits of a conservative cut, crisp shirts, silk ties not terribly in fashion but not terribly out. The brims of their hats were turned down at precisely the same angle. Szara found himself thinking in Russian,
My God, the hats are here.
The two men had a particular coloration that a Frenchman of the better sort will assume after lunch, a faint, rose-tinted blush on the cheeks which informs the knowledgeable that the beef was good and the wine not too bad. They introduced themselves and presented cards.

They were, they said, fire inspectors. They would just have a brief look around, if it wasn't terribly inconvenient.

Fire inspectors they were not.

But Szara had to go along with the game, so he invited them in. By the time they'd climbed to the third floor, Kranov had pulled the blanket off the window and flung it over the wireless, turning it into a curious dark hump on an old table from which a wire ran up the corner of the wall and disappeared into the attic through a ragged hole in the ceiling. Kranov himself was either in a closet or under the bed in Odile's apartment on the second floor—one of those truly inspired hiding places found amid panic—but in the event he was unseen. The Frenchmen didn't look, they didn't strip the blanket off the wireless, and they didn't even bother to enter Odile's apartment. One of them said, “So much paper in a room like this. You must be careful with your cigarettes. Perhaps a bucket of sand ought to be placed in the corner.”

They touched the brims of their hats with their forefingers and departed. Szara, his shirt soaked at the armpits, collapsed in a chair. Somewhere on the floor below he heard a bump and a curse as Kranov extricated himself from whatever cranny he'd jammed himself into.
A comedy,
Szara said to himself,
a comedy.
He pressed his palms against his temples.

Kranov, swearing under his breath, threw the blanket into a corner and flashed Goldman a disaster signal. For the next two hours messages flew back and forth, Kranov's pencil scratching out columns of figures as he encoded responses to Goldman's precise questions. Somewhere, Szara was certain, the French had a receiver and were taking note of all the numbers crackling through the summer air.

By the end of the exchange Szara realized that the game was not actually over, the network was not blown. Not quite. They had, evidently, been warned, probably by the Deuxième Bureau— diplomatic and military intelligence—using agents of the Paris Prefecture of police or the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, the DST, the French equivalent of the American FBI. The warning came in two parts:

We know what you're doing, went the first.

This was no great surprise, when Szara had a moment to think about it. The French police had always insisted, since Fouché served Napoleon, on knowing exactly what went on in their country, and most particularly in their capital. Whether they actually did anything about what they knew was treated as a very different matter—here political decisions might be involved—but they were scrupulously careful in keeping track of what went on, neighborhood by neighborhood, village by village. So their knowledge of the existence of
OPAL
was, finally, no great surprise.

From their point of view it did not hurt them that the Russians spied on Germany, the traditional enemy of France. They may have received, at a very high level, compensation for allowing
OPAL
a free hand, compensation in the form of refined intelligence product. Always, there were arrangements that did not meet the eye.

But the second part of the warning was quite serious: if you truly mean to become an ally of Germany, we may decide that your days here are numbered, since such an alliance might damage French interests, and that will not be permitted to happen. So here, gentlemen, are a pair of fire inspectors, and we send them to you in a most courteous and considerate fashion, which is to say before anything actually starts burning.

We're sure you'll understand.

In July, the
OTTER
operation ended. They would hear from Dr. Baumann no more. So that month's exchange of information for emigration certificates was the last. Szara signaled de Montfried for a meeting, he responded immediately.

De Montfried was driven in from his country house, a château near Tours. He was wearing a cream-colored suit, a pale blue shirt, and a little bow tie. He carefully placed his straw hat on the marquetry table in the library, folded his hands, and looked expectantly at Szara. When told the operation was over, he covered his face with his hands, as though in great fatigue. They sat for some time without speaking. Outside it was oppressively quiet; a long, empty, summer afternoon.