by Alan Furst
Divide by four hundred and eighty, Szara calculated, and you have the monthly bomber production of the Reich. Though tanks would be of great interest, no number could so well inform Soviet military planners of German strategic intentions and capabilities.
Szara jotted down the number as though he were making notes for a feature story-our motto has always been excellence, Baumann claims. “Substantial,” he said, tapping his pencil against the number on the page. “Your efforts must surely be appreciated.”
“In certain ministries, that’s true.”
But not in others. Szara put the notebook and pencil in his pocket. “We journalists don’t often meet with such candor.”
“There are times when candor is called for.”
“Perhaps we’ll be meeting again,” Szara said.
Baumann nodded his assent, a stiff little bow: a man of dignity and culture had made a decision, taken honor into account, determined that greater considerations prevailed.
They went back to the office and chatted for a time. Szara restated his gratitude for a delightful evening. Baumann was gracious, saw him to his taxi when it arrived, smiled, shook hands, wished him safe journey home.
The taxi rattled along past brown factory walls. Szara closed his eyes. She stood at the center of the room, olive skin in half tones, pale breasts that rose and fell as she breathed. Marta Haecht, he thought.
Fate rules our lives. So the Slavs seemed to believe, and Szara had lived among them long enough to see the sense of the way they thought. One simply had to admire the fine hand of destiny, how it wove a life, tied desire to betrayal, ambition to envy, added idealism, love, false gods, missed trains, then pulled sharply on the threads, and behold! — there a human danced and struggled.
Here, he thought, was that exquisite deployment of fate known as the coincidence.
A man goes to Germany and is offered, simultaneously, both salvation for his aching soul and a guarantee of life itself. Amazing. What should such a man believe? For he can see that a clandestine affiliation with Dr. Baumann and his magic wire will make him so appetizing a fellow to the special services that they will keep him alive if the devil himself tries to snatch his ankle. As for his soul, well, he’d been having rather a bad time with it lately. A man whose friends are vanishing every day must learn to nuzzle death in order to keep his sanity-didn’t a kind of affection always take root in proximity? This is a man in trouble. A man who sits in a park in Ostend, offered, at least, a possibility of salvation, then stands and walks away in order to keep a timely appointment with those he has every reason to believe mean to abduct him-this man must need a reason to live. And if the reason to live is in Berlin? Tightly locked to the very means that will ensure survival?
Oh, a glorious coincidence.
In a vast and shifting universe, where stars glitter and die in endless night, one may choose to accept coincidence of every sort. Szara did.
There remained, amid such speculation, one gravely material difficulty, the Okhrana document, and the need to satisfy what he now believed to be a second group of masters-Renate Braun, General Bloch-within the intelligence apparat. For the Baumann assignment came, he was almost positive, from his traditional, longtime friends in the NKVD-the Foreign Department crowd, Abramov and others, some known, some forever in shadow.
Now, to stay alive, he would have to become an intelligence officer: an NKVD of one.
On the morning of 26 November, Szara filed as instructed at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. Not a dispatch, but the development of information that Nezhenko’s telegram had specified: Baumann’s age and demeanor, his wife, how they lived, the factory, the proud history. Not a word about swage wire, only “plays a crucial part in German rearmament production.”
And there had been only three for dinner. Marta Haecht he would not give them.
Had the apparat known what it was getting, Szara reasoned, they’d have sent real officers. No, this was somebody who’d been informed of a potential opportunity in Berlin, somebody who’d told his assistant, Oh send Szara up there, figuring he’d let them know if he came across something useful. That was the nature of the intelligence landscape as he understood it: in a world of perpetual night, a thousand signals flickered in the darkness, some would change the world, others were meaningless, or even dangerous. Not even an organization the size of the NKVD could examine them all, so now and then it called on a knowledgeable friend.
The people at the embassy had been told to expect him, they took his report without comment. Then they informed him he was to return to Moscow. On the Soviet merchant vessel Kolstroi, departing Rostock, on the Bay of Pomerania, at five in the afternoon on 30 November. That was four days away. Recall to Moscow. Szara had to fight for equilibrium. The phrase sometimes meant arrest; the request to return was polite enough, but once they had you back in the country … No. Not him, and not now. He could anticipate some fairly uncomfortable interrogations. By “friends” who would show up at his apartment bringing vodka and food-that was, at least, the usual method: so glad to have you back, you must tell us everything about your trip.
You really must.
He calmed himself down, decided not to think about it, and left the embassy with a pocket full of money and a determined heart, the twin pillars of espionage.
Were they watching him? The Foreign Department group? The Renate Braun group? He assumed they were-they’d certainly, thank God, been with him on the journey from Prague to Berlin. A lot of them.
He knew just enough, he thought, to lose a surveillance. Three hours it took-museums, train stations, department stores, taxis, trams, and restaurants with back doors. At last arriving, alone as far as he could tell, at an antiques store. Here he bought a painting, oil on canvas, dated 1909, in a heavy gilt frame. By one Professor Ebendorfer, the proprietor rather haughtily informed him, of the University of Heidelberg. A four-by-three-foot rectangle, the painting was executed in the Romantic style: a Greek youth, a shepherd, sat cross-legged at the foot of a broken column and played his pipe whilst his flock grazed nearby, a rich blue sky was studded with fleecy clouds, snow-capped mountains rose in the distance. Huldigung der Naxos, it was called-Homage to Naxos-and Professor Ebendorfer had signed it artfully in the lower right corner, on a laurel bush beset by a nibbling ram.
Back in the room at the narrow house, Szara went seriously to work, as he should have done all along.
And since he was not looking for anything in particular, simply performing a mechanical task that left his mind in a rather listless, neutral state, he eventually found everything. He immediately wished he hadn’t. It was poison he found: the knowledge that killed. But there it was. He’d meant only to leave the original dossier, which would not pass a Russian border inspection, in Berlin, and carry with him to Moscow a condensed document, in a personal shorthand, of facts and circumstances. Using a cipher of contemporary dates and meaningless cities for the ones in the dossier, he believed he could get it past the NKVD border guards as “journalist’s notes.” These guards were not at all the NKVD types who worked in foreign political affairs-they were thorough, uncorruptible, and dull. He could handle them.
The job he set himself was like adding columns of figures-but it was this very exercise in brainless transposition that raised the answer above the horizon. Szara was accustomed to writer’s thinking: the flash of insight or the revealing perspective produced by the persistent mind. Copying, he’d thought, was idiot’s work. So now he learned a lesson.
To organize the effort he began at the beginning and proceeded, in a table of events, week by week, month by month. Without really meaning to, he’d fashioned what intelligence officers called a chron, short for chronology. For in that discipline what and who were of great interest, but it was often when that produced usable information.
Before the revolution, Bolshevik contact with the Okhrana was common enough. Between revolutionaries and government special services there is almost always a relationship, sometimes covert, so
metimes not. It might be said that they spend so very much time thinking and scheming about each other that it becomes their inevitable destiny to meet, and both write such connections off to intelligence gathering. The illusion of virginity is thereby maintained.
But DUBOK far exceeded the bounds of normalcy in this relationship, bought his safety with his comrades’ lives, and was nurtured by the Okhrana like the most tender sprout imaginable. For him they duplicated the grim reality of the revolutionary experience but took care to buffer it, to draw its teeth. He went, like all the underground operatives, to jail and, like many others, escaped. But duration told the tale. They put him in Bailov prison, in Baku (he spent his time learning German), but had him out four months later. Exile, too, he had to experience, but it was to Solvychegodsk they sent him, in the north of European Russia, and not to Siberia. And he “escaped” after only four months. Lucky, this DUBOK. Two years later he was “caught” again, then sent to finish his term in Solvychegodsk but tired of it after six months: long enough to hear what other exiles had to say, long enough to maintain his credibility as a Bolshevik operative, then, a man on a string, home again.
DUBOK, it became clear, was a criminal, was possessed of a criminal mind. His method never varied: he softened those around him by saying what they wanted to hear-he had a superb instinct for what that might be-then sacrificed them as necessary. He exploited weakness, emasculated strength, and never hesitated to indulge his own substantial cowardice. The Okhrana officer, Szara came to realize, manipulated DUBOK effortlessly because of a lifetime spent in the company of criminals. He understood them, understood them so well that he’d come to feel a sort of sorrowful affection for them. With time he developed the instincts of a priest: evil existed; the task was to work productively within its confines.
The officer, if one read between the lines, was profoundly interested in DUBOK‘s effect on Bolshevik intellectuals. These men and women were often brilliant, knew science, languages, poetry, philosophy. DUBOK, for them, was a kind of symbol, a beloved creature from the lower depths, an enlightened thug, and their comradeship with him confirmed them as members of a newly reordered society. A political scientist, a philosopher, an economist, a poet, could only make revolution if they shared their destiny with a criminal. He was the official representative of the real world. Thus they advanced his standing at every opportunity. And DUBOK knew it. And DUBOK loathed them for it. Understanding condescension with every bone in his body, taking revenge at his leisure, proving that equality was in their minds, not his, as he obliterated them.
Now Szara had known from the beginning he had in his hands a Georgian and, when his perfectly capable mind finally bothered to do arithmetic, a Georgian at least fifty-five years old with a history of revolutionary work in Tbilisi and Baku. It could have been any one of a number of candidates, including the leaders of the Georgian khvost, but, as Szara worked laboriously through the dossier, these were eliminated by DUBOK himself. For the benefit of the Okhrana, DUBOK had written out a description of his friend Ordjonikidze. Eighteen months later he mentioned the Armenian terrorist Ter Petrossian, seen taking part in a bank “expropriation” in Baku; referred, a few pages later, to the good-natured Abel Yenukidze; and spoke harshly against his hated enemy, Mdivani. In May of 1913, he was pressed to organize a situation in which the revolutionary Beria might be compromised, but DUBOK never quite managed to do more than talk about that.
After a day and a half, Andre Szara could no longer avoid the truth: this was Koba himself, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, son of a savage, drunken cobbler from Gori, the sublime leader Stalin. For eleven years, from 1906 to 1917, he had been the Okhrana’s pet pig, snouting up the most rare and delicious truffles that the underground so thoughtlessly hid from its enemies.
This room, Szara thought, staring out at the gray sky over Berlin, too much happens in it. He rose from the desk, stretched to ease his back, lit a cigarette, walked to the window. The lady in silks was rustling about downstairs, doing whatever mysterious things she did all day. Below, on the sidewalk, an old man was holding the leash of a grizzled Alsatian dog while it sprayed the base of a street lamp.
Szara spent part of Sunday morning removing a soiled sheet of cotton cloth that sealed the back of Huldigung der Naxos, then distributing the sheets of the Okhrana dossier across the back of the painting itself, securing them with brown cord tied off to the heads of tiny nails he pounded in with a tack hammer. The cotton cloth he refitted with great care, the bent nails installed by the original framer repositioned in the dents and rust tracks they’d formed over the years. The weight of the heavy gilded frame concealed the presence of the paper, he thought, and a hundred years from now, some art restorer …
On Monday he was, for the first time, onstage as a German, speaking with slow deliberation, purging the Yiddish lilt from his accent, hoping to pass for a mildly unusual individual born somewhere far away from Berlin. He found that if he combed his hair straight back off his forehead, tied his tie very tight, and carried his chin in a position that, to him, felt particularly high, the disguise was credible. He took the name Grawenske, suggesting distant Slavic or Wendish origins, not at all uncommon in Germany.
He telephoned the office of an auctioneer and was given the name of a warehouse that specialized in the storage of fine art (“Humidity is your enemy!” the man told him). Herr Grawenske appeared there at eleven promptly, explained that he was joining the accounting staff of a small Austrian chemical company in Chile, muttered about his wife’s sister who would be occupying his residence, and left Professor Ebendorfer’s masterpiece in their care, to be crated, then stored. He paid for two years, a surprisingly reasonable amount of money, gave a fictitious address in Berlin, and was handed a receipt. The remainder of the officer’s effects, and the fine satchel, were distributed to shops that supported charity missions.
Marta Haecht had given him the phone number at the little magazine where she “helped out the art director.” Szara tried to call several times, chilled to the bone as the flat Berlin dusk settled down on the city. The first time, she’d gone on an errand to the printers’. The second time, somebody giggled and said they didn’t know where she’d gotten to. On the third try, close to quitting time, she came to the phone.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” he said. “May I see you tonight?”
“There is a dinner. My parents’ wedding anniversary.”
“Then late.”
She hesitated. “I’ll be returning home …”
What? Then he understood there were people near the telephone. “Home from a restaurant?”
“No, it isn’t that.”
“Home to sleep.”
“It would be better.”
“What time is the dinner over?”
“One can’t rush away, I hope you’ll understand. It is a, it is an occasion, festive …”
“Oh.”
“Do you have to go away tomorrow?”
“It can’t be helped.”
“Then I don’t see how …”
“I’ll wait for you. Maybe there’s a way.”
“I’ll try.”
Just after eleven the doorbell rang. Szara raced downstairs, hurried past the landlady’s door-opened the width of an eye-and let her in. In the little room, she took off her coat. An aura of the cold night clung to her skin, he could feel it. She was wearing a midnight blue party dress, taffeta, with ruffles. The back was all tiny hooks and eyes. “Be careful,” she said as he fumbled. “I mustn’t stay too long. Here it is not done to leave a party.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That a friend was going away.”
It was not a magic night. They made love, but the tension in her did not break. Afterward she was sad. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Sweeter to have a memory of the snow.” With the tips of his fingers he pushed the hair back off her forehead. “I’ll never see you again,” she said. She bit her lip to keep from crying.
He walked
her home, almost to the door. They kissed good-bye, dry and cold, and there was nothing to say.
In the late November of 1937, the Soviet merchant vessel Kolstroi shipped anchor in the port of Rostock, moved slowly up the Warnemunde inlet into Lubeck bay and, swinging north into the Baltic and setting a north-by-easterly course to skirt the Sasenitz peninsula and pass south of the Danish isle of Bornholm, made for Leningrad harbor, some eight hundred and forty nautical miles away.
The Kolstroi, heavily laden with machine tools, truck tires, and bar aluminum loaded at the French port of Boulogne, docked at Rostock only to complete its complement of eleven passengers bound for Leningrad. Moving up the Warnemunde in gathering darkness, the Kolstroi sounded its foghorn continually, joining a chorus of in-and outbound freighters as it reached Lubeck bay, where the Baltic fogbanks rolled in toward shore in the stiff northerly winds. Andre Szara and the other passengers were not allowed the freedom of the deck until the ship was beyond the German territorial limit. When Szara did seek the air, after the close quarters of the ship’s lounge where they were fed supper, there was little visibility, nothing of the lights on the German coast, only black water heaving in November swells and a building gale that drove iced salt spray onto the metal plates of the deck, where it froze into a lead-colored glaze. He bore it as long as he could, staring into the fog whipping past the ship’s lights, unable to see land.
The Kolstroi was Soviet territory; he’d bowed under the vast weight of it before they ever sailed, his possessions spread out on a table under the cold eyes of a security officer. The journalist Szara meant nothing to this one, Homo Stalinus, human as clock. He was thankful he had disposed of the Okhrana dossier before he left Berlin-memory itself was frightening in the atmosphere aboard the freighter.
The passengers were a mixed group. There were three English university students, with creamy skins and bright eyes, terribly earnest young men on a dream voyage to what they believed to be their spiritual homeland. There was one middle-age trade representative, suffering from an illness-attempted escape, Szara thought-who was dragged on board by NKVD operatives. The tips of his shoes scraped the wooden gangplank as they carried him onto the ship-obviously he had been drugged senseless. He was not the only passenger going home to die. They were a strange brotherhood, silent, self-contained, having abandoned themselves to a fate they deemed inevitable; the man who’d been dragged on board proved the futility of flight. They rarely slept, greedy for their remaining hours of introspection, pacing about the deck when they could stand the cold, their lips moving as they rehearsed imagined conversations with their interrogators.