by Alan Furst
He did see friends from time to time, those who remained, but no honest thing could be said and the accumulated caution and reserve strangled affection. Still, they met. Sometimes, finding themselves alone and unobserved, they spoke of what they’d seen and heard. Horror stories; separations, disappearances, failures of nerve. The light had gone out, it seemed, the very notion of heroism excised, the world now filled with soft, bruised, frightened people scheming over a few lumps of coal or a spoonful of sugar. You caught fear from friends, like a malady, and they caught it from you, and nobody suggested a cure.
Abramov was a rock, and Szara clung to him like a drowning man. They would sit in a warm office in Dzerzhinsky Square and the officer would teach him what he had to know. The principles of the work couldn’t be spelled out precisely, you had to listen to anecdotes until you had an intuitive feel for what was effective and what wasn’t. They discussed cities-some operations in Germany were run from neighboring countries, which meant cities like Geneva, Paris, Luxembourg, Amsterdam, Brussels. Prague was no longer a possibility. Warsaw was extremely dangerous; the Polish services were powerful and deft, had an astute understanding of Soviet operational habits. Brussels was best-espionage, as long as it wasn’t aimed at the Belgian government, wasn’t even illegal.
Sometimes Abramov took him to meet people; these were momentary, casual occasions, a handshake, a few minutes of conversation. He had the impression of individuals who instantly knew who you were, what you were. He met Dershani in his office: a plain desk, filing cabinets, a dead flower in a glass. The man himself was exceptionally polite; the thin lips smiled. “I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said. Szara thought about that later. The face was memorable-like looking at a hawk, it was the quality of the eyes that held your attention, suggested a world where they had seen things you hadn’t.
He kept busy in the daytime, but the nights were not good. When the icy March snow rattled on the window he’d bury himself in blankets and clothing and sometimes his dead wife would visit him, and he would talk to her. Out loud. Talk to an empty room, in a certain quiet, definite language they had devised, a language meant to exclude the world from the fortress of sanity they had built to protect themselves.
They had been married-some might say “married”-by a Red Army major in 1918. “Be as one with the new order” was the way he’d blessed the union. Three years later she was dead, and they’d often been separated during that period by the exigencies of civil war. Working as a nurse in the Byelorussian town of Berdichev, she’d written him every day-notes scrawled on newsprint or scraps of paper-then sent a packet through when the postal system functioned. Byelorussia and the Ukraine were then, as always, the storm centers of madness. During the civil war, Berdichev was taken fourteen times, by Petlyura’s army, by Denikin’s, by Bolshevik units, by Galician irregulars, Polish infantry, Tutnik’s bands, Maroussia’s rebels, the anarchists under the insane Nestor Mahkno-whose cavalry favored Jewish prayer shawls as saddlecloths-and by what the writer Grossman referred to as “nobody’s Ninth Regiment.” Eventually, somebody had killed her, exactly who or where or under what circumstance he’d never learned.
Despite the long separations, there had been an iron bond between them, as though they were twins. There was nothing he feared to tell her, and nothing she did not understand. In the Moscow nights that March he needed her desperately. It was insane to speak out loud in the empty little apartment-he feared the neighbors, denunciation, so he used his softest voice-but he could not stop doing it. He asked her what to do. She told him to live a day at a time, and to be kind. Somehow this eased his heart and he could fall asleep.
There was one event that month which was to mean a great deal to him later, though at the time it had no special significance. It seemed just one more manifestation of the Great Inexplicable that lay at the heart of Russia, something you had to get used to if you meant to hang on to your sanity in that place. Nezhenko invited him to a semiofficial evening at the Cafe Sport on Tverskaya street. This was principally a gathering of Moscow’s foreign community, so there was plenty of food and plenty to drink. At the height of the evening, conversation was quieted by somebody banging a spoon on a glass, then a well-known actor rose to present a recitation. Szara knew him slightly, Poziny, a barrel-chested man with a deeply lined face who played character roles in the Moscow Art Theater- Szara had seen him do a splendid Uncle Vanya that had brought the audience to its feet for the curtain call.
To cries of Oop-la! a grinning Poziny was hoisted atop a table by the wall. He cleared his throat, gathered the audience to him, then announced he would recite a work by Aleksandr Blok, written in the early days of the Revolution, called The Scythians. The Scythians, he explained for the benefit of foreign guests, were the earliest Russian tribe, one of the world’s most ancient peoples, known for intricate goldworking and exemplary horsemanship, who inhabited a region north of the Black Sea. While Poziny introduced the poem, several young men and women distributed translations in French, English, and German so that the guests could read along.
Poziny held nothing back. From the first line on, his powerful voice burned with conviction:
There are millions of you; of us, swarms and swarms and swarms.
Try and battle against us.
Yes, we are Scythians; yes, Asiatics,
With slanting, greedy eyes.
… Oh, old world
Russia is a Sphinx. In joy and grief,
And pouring with black blood,
She peers, peers, peers at thee,
With hatred and with love.
Yes, love, as only our blood can love,
You have forgotten there can be such love
That burns and destroys.
Come to our side. From the horrors of war
Come to our peaceful arms;
Before it is too late, sheathe the old sword.
Comrades, let us be brothers.
And if not, we have nothing to lose.
We, too, can be perfidious if we choose;
And down all time you will be cursed
By the sick humanity of an age to come.
Before comely Europe
Into our thickets and forests we’ll disperse,
And then we shall turn upon you
Our ugly Asiatic face.
But we ourselves henceforth shall be no shield of yours,
We ourselves henceforth will enter no battle.
We shall look on with our narrow eyes
When your deadly battles rage.
Nor shall we stir when the ferocious Hun
Rifles the pockets of the dead,
Burns down cities, drives herds into churches,
And roasts the flesh of the white brothers.
This is the last time-bethink thee, old world! —
To the fraternal feast of toil and peace,
The last time-to the bright, fraternal feast
The barbarian lyre now summons thee.
There were several very long seconds of silence; only Poziny’s graceful inclination of the head summoned applause that resolved the tension in the room. Everyone there knew what the poem meant, in the early days of the revolution and in March of 1938. Or thought they knew.
The Austrian chemical engineer H. J. Brandt arrived in Copenhagen on the Baltic ferry Kren Lindblad from Tallinn, Estonia, on 4 April 1938.
The grammar school teacher E. Roberts, from Edinburgh, took the Copenhagen-Amsterdam train, arriving at Amsterdam’s Central Station in the early evening of 6 April.
The naturalized Belgian citizen Stefan Leib, of Czechoslovakian origin, got off the Amsterdam train at Brussels toward noon on 7 April, going immediately to the shop called Cartes de la Monde- maps of the world; antique, old, and new-he owned in the rue de Juyssens, in the winding back streets of the old business district.
A serious man, Monsieur Leib, in his early thirties, quiet, somewhat scholarly in his tweed jacket and flannels, and notably industrious. He could be found, most n
ights, in the small office at the rear of the store at a large oak desk piled high with old maps- perhaps the Netherlands of the seventeenth century, decorated with curly-haired cherubs puffing clouds of wind from the cardinal points of the compass-as well as utilitarian road maps of the Low Countries, France, and Germany; tidal charts, Michelin and Baedeker guides, or the latest rendering of Abyssinia (important if you had followed the fortunes of Italian expeditionary forces), Tanganyika, or French Equatorial Africa. Whatever you might want in cartography, Monsieur Leib’s shop was almost sure to have it.
On the evening of 12 April, those with an eye for moderately prominent journalists might have spotted Monsieur Leib out for dinner with A. A. Szara, recently assigned to the Paris bureau of Pravda. Spotted, that is, if one happened to visit a very dark and out-of-the-way Chinese restaurant, of dubious reputation, in the Asian district of Brussels.
In the end, Abramov and his associates had not made a choice of cities or networks for Dr. Baumann’s case officer. Life and circumstance intervened and chose for them. Even the multiple European networks of the Rote Kapelle-the Red Orchestra, as the German security services had nicknamed them-were not immune to the daily vicissitudes and tragedies that the rest of the world had to confront. In this instance, a deputy officer of the Paris-based OPAL network, work name Guillaume, was late for a clandestine meeting established in Lyon-one of his group leaders from Berlin was coming in by train under a cover identity-and drove recklessly to avoid having to wait for a fallback meeting three days later. His Renault sedan failed to make a curve on the N6 just outside Macon and spun sideways into a roadside plane tree. Guillaume was thrown clear and died the next day in the hospital in Macon.
Captain I. J. Goldman, rezident of OPAL under the painstakingly crafted cover of Stefan Leib, was brought back to Moscow by a circuitous route-“using passports like straw,” grumbled one of the “cobblers” who manufactured or altered identity papers at the NKVD Foreign Department-for lengthy consultations. Goldman, son of a Marxist lawyer from Bucharest, had volunteered for recruitment in 1934 and was, following productive service in Spain, something of a rising star.
Like all rezidents, he hated personnel problems. He accepted the complicated burdens of secrecy, a religion whose rituals demanded vast expenditures of time, money, and ingenuity, and the occasional defeat managed by the police and counterespionage forces that opposed him, but natural disasters, like road accidents or wireless/ telegraph breakdowns, seemed especially cruel punishments from heaven. When a clandestine operator like Guillaume met an accidental death, the first thing the police did was to inform, or try to, a notional family that didn’t exist. Had Goldman himself not contacted hospitals, police, and mortuaries in the region, Guillaume might have been determined a defector or runaway, thereby causing immense dislocation as the entire system was hurriedly restructured to protect itself.
Next, Goldman had to assure himself, and his directorate in Moscow, that the accident was an accident, an investigation complicated by the need to operate secretly and from a distance. Goldman, burning a cover identity that had cost thousands of roubles to construct, hired a lawyer in Macon to make that determination. Finally, by the time he arrived in Moscow, he was able to defend himself against all accusations save one: his supervision had been lax to the degree that one of his staff drove in an undisciplined manner. On this point he criticized himself before his superiors, then described countermeasures-lectures, display of the autopsy report obtained by the Maconnais lawyer-that would be undertaken to eliminate such events in the future. Behind their stone faces, the men and women who directed OPAL laughed at his discomfort: they knew life, love affairs, bizarre sexual aberrations, lost keys, gambling, petty jealousies; all the absurd human horseshit that network rezidents had to deal with. They’d learned to improvise, now it was his turn.
When they were done scowling, they gave him a choice: elevate the Paris group leader to Guillaume’s position or accept a new deputy. This was no choice at all, group leaders were infamously difficult to replace. On their ability to stroke and soothe, wheedle, nag, or threaten, everything depended. He could, on the other hand, accept a new deputy, the journalist Szara, an amateur “who had done a few things with fair success.”
Goldman would have preferred experienced help, perhaps transferred from what he believed to be less crucial networks, for OPAL ran some fourteen agents in France and Germany and would now service a fifteenth (Baumann, officially designated OTTER), but the purges had eaten down into the apparai from the top and operationally sophisticated staff simply wasn’t available. It was arranged for him to meet with Szara, who would work with a co-deputy in OPAL but would essentially be on his own in Paris while Goldman, as “illegal” rezident, worked in protective isolation in Brussels. In the end he put a good face on it and indicated he was pleased with the arrangement. Somewhere, operating deep within the committee underbrush, there was a big, important rat who wanted Szara in Paris-Goldman could smell him.
Then too, for Goldman, it was best to be cooperative; his rising star was lately a little obscured, through no fault of his own, by a dark cloud on the horizon. His training class, the Brotherhood Front of 1934-in fact a fractious crowd recruited from every lost corner of the Balkans-was not turning out as senior apparat people thought it would. A distressing number of the “brothers” had left home; some defected, harboring far less fraternal affection than their Russian family had supposed. The undisputed leader of the class, a Bulgarian, had vanished from Barcelona and resurfaced in Paris, where he’d become entangled in emigre politics and gotten himself arrested by French internal security officers in July of ‘37. A Serbian had disappeared back into the mountains of his homeland after a very complex exfiltration from a Spanish prison-a dreadful instance of ingratitude, though it was the NKVD that had shopped him to Franco’s military intelligence in the first place, expedient neutralization after he resisted an order to purge POUM members in his guerrilla unit. And a Hungarian from Esztergom, worthless to the apparat from day one, had also fled to Paris where, hiding out in a Montmartre hotel, he’d apparently been murdered by a merchant seaman. What had he been involved in? Nobody knew.
Given that chamber of horrors, Goldman would be saying yes sir to senior officers for the foreseeable future. Privately, he had grave misgivings about Andre Szara. The journalist seemed both arrogant and insecure-a normal enough combination but potentially lethal under the stresses of clandestine work. Goldman was familiar with Szara’s writing, he thought it sometimes powerful, almost always informative. But Goldman had been in the business just long enough to fear the creative personality. He’d developed a taste for blunt, stolid types, unemotional, who worked day and night without coming down with fevers, men and women who didn’t nurse grudges, who preferred verification to intuition, were endlessly dependable and there when you needed them, could think on their feet in a crisis, recognized a crisis when one developed, and had the sense to ask you what to do when they weren’t sure. Careers were made with such people. Not with the Andre Szaras of the world. But he was stuck, in no position to argue, and so he’d do the best he could.
Over the ghastly chop suey in Brussels, Goldman told him, “Be a journalist!”
What?
“Well, you are one, of course, very good, yes, but you must now make a special effort to live the life, and to be seen to live the life, one would expect of such a person. Go about, seek out your colleagues, haunt the right cafes. No slinking around, is what I mean. Of course you’ll see the necessity of it, yes?”
Goldman made him mad, pointing this out. It was true that he’d habitually avoided journalists’ haunts and parties and gone off on his own. For one thing, it didn’t pay to be too friendly with Western Europeans-the lead diva of the Moscow Opera had been sent to the camps for dancing at a party with the Japanese ambassador. For another, he forever had to accomplish some special little task for the apparat. Such things took time, care, patience. And you didn’t want colleagues around w
hen you did it. So, General Vlasy, the tread problem on the new R-20 tank turns out to be no problem at all, eh? and all that sort of thing, certainly not with some knowing fellow journalist suppressing a cackle in the background.
Szara never really did respond to Goldman’s direction. He looked at the gray noodles on his plate for a moment, then went on with the conversation. Inside he was broiling. Wasn’t he unhappy enough about mortgaging his soul to Abramov and secretly abandoning his profession? Apparently not. They now laid upon his heart a heaping tablespoon of Russian irony, directing him to act more like what he no longer was. All this from some snotty little Romanian who thought he spoke idiomatic Russian, was very much his junior in age, and looked like (and probably acted like) some kind of rodent. Small eyes that glittered, ears a little too big, features set close together. Like a smart mouse. Maybe too smart. Who the hell did he think he was?
Back in Paris the following day, however, he kept his opinions to himself. “You’ve met Yves,” said his fellow deputy, using Goldman’s work name. “What do you think?”
Szara pretended to ponder the question. He did not want to commit himself, but neither did he want to seem like a spineless idiot-he was going to have to work closely with this woman. She was the sort of individual who, in the setting of a business office, might well be known as a bit of a terror. Abramov had warned him about her: work name-Elli, real name-Annique Schau-Wehrli, reputation-lioness. In person she turned out to be fiftyish, short, stout, with a thrust-out bosom like a pouter pigeon and glasses on a chain around her neck. She wore a built-up shoe on one foot and walked with a cane, having been born with one leg shorter than the other. Szara found himself drawn to her-she was magnetic, perceptive, and also rather pretty, with rosy complexion, light, curly hair, a screen siren’s long eyelashes, and omniscient eyes lit by a brisk, cheerful hatred.
She was an ardent, blistering Marxist, a former pillar of the Swiss Communist party from a wealthy bourgeois (and long ago rejected) family in Lucerne. She had a tongue like a sword, spoke six languages, and feared absolutely nothing. In Paris, she worked as office manager and resident saint for a League of Nations satellite office, the International Law Institute, which issued oceans of studies attempting to encourage the countries of the world to normalize and standardize their legal codes. Wasn’t the theft of a female ancestor’s soul in Nyasaland much the same, when all was said and done, as a stock swindle in Sweden?