Dark Star ns-2

by Alan Furst

  “A message for you was left at my law office. It’s in with the reports.”

  “For me?”

  “It says Jean Marc on the envelope.”

  This was unusual, but Szara did not intend to go burrowing for the message in front of Seneschal. They drove in silence for a time, up the deserted boulevard Beaumarchais past the huge wedding cake of a building that housed the Winter Circus. Seneschal flipped his cigarette out the window and yawned. The light changed to red and the Renault rolled to a stop beside an empty taxi. Szara handed over a small slip of paper with the location, time, and date of the next meeting. “Enjoy your weekend,” he said, jumped out of the Renault, and slid neatly into the back of the taxicab, slightly startling the driver. “Turn right,” he said as the light went green, then watched as Seneschal’s car disappeared up the boulevard.

  It was a little after three in the morning when Szara slipped into the rue Delesseux house and climbed to the third floor. Kranov was done with his W/T chores for the evening and Szara had the room to himself. First he found the envelope with Jean Marc printed across the front. Inside was a mimeographed square of paper with a drawing of a bearded man in Roman armor, a six-point star on his shield and a dagger held before him. The ticket entitled the bearer to Seat 46 in the basement theater at the Rue Muret Synagogue at seven-thirty in the evening of the eighteenth day of the month of Iyyar, in the year 5698, for the annual Lag b’Omer play performed by the synagogue youth group. The address was deep in the Marais, the Jewish quartier of Paris. For those who might need a date according to the Julian calendar, a rather grudging 18 May was written in a lower corner.

  Szara tucked it in a pocket-really, what would they think of next. A communication traveling upward from a network operative to a deputy was something he’d never heard of, and he rather thought that Abramov would go a little pale if he found out about it, but he was becoming, over time, quite hardened to exotic manifestations, and he had no intention of permitting himself to brood about this one. He had a ticket to a synagogue youth play, so he’d go to a synagogue youth play.

  A thin sheet of paper bearing decrypts from the previous night’s Moscow traffic awaited his attention, and this he did find disturbing. The problem wasn’t with the SILO net-some of the answers to the Directorate’s questions were probably in the manila envelope he’d picked up from Seneschal-but the transmission that concerned OTTER, Dr. Baumann, worried him. Moscow wanted him squeezed. Hard. And right away. There was no misreading their intention, even in the dead, attenuated language of decoded cables. At first glance, it seemed as though they wanted to turn Baumann Milling into what the Russians called an espionage center-why else show such a profound interest in personnel? Because, if you thought about it a moment, they expected a conflagration. Soviet intelligence officers were not queasy types. Disaster only made them colder-that he’d seen for himself. The Foreign Department of the NKVD-now called the First Chief Directorate-had a hundred windows on Germany. What did they see coming? Whatever it was, they didn’t believe that Baumann would survive it.

  With some effort he recaptured his mind and forced himself to go to work, emptying the manila envelope on the table. Valais’s list of German applications for residence permits presented no problems, he simply recopied it. Seneschal’s material from ARBOR, Lotte Huber, was brief and to the point, the lawyer had essentially synthesized what he got and in effect done Szara’s job for him: the German Trade Mission was probing the French markets for bauxite (which meant aluminum, which meant airframes), phosphorus (flares, artillery shells, tracer bullets), cadmium (which meant nothing at all to him), and assorted domestic products, notably coffee and chocolate. From ALTO, Dolek, he would pass on the revised telephone directory of the attache’s office but would eliminate the major’s letter from his sister in Lubeck. For himself, he informed the Directorate that he’d met with the SILO group leader, disbursed funds, and learned that LICHEN was not functioning due to illness.

  Next he tore up the SILO originals, burned them in a ceramic ashtray, then walked down the hall and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Almost anyone who came in contact with the espionage world was told the story of the beginner operative who’d been instructed to either burn his papers or tear them into bits and flush them down the toilet. An anxious sort, he’d become confused, crumpled up a large wad of paper and dropped it in the toilet, then put a match to it and watched, aghast, as the flames set the toilet seat on fire.

  Back in the W/T office, the big alarm clock by Kranov’s work area said it was four-fifteen in the morning. Szara sat at the table and lit a cigarette; the darkened window hid any change of light, but he could hear a bird start up outside. He thought of the hundreds of operatives all across Europe who had finished with their nightwork, as he had, and now fell prey to the same pre-dawn malaise: useless white energy, a nagging sense of some nameless thing left undone, a mind that refused to disengage. Sleep was out of the question.

  He squared up the pad of flimsy paper and began to doodle. The memory of Dolek’s handwriting, the enormous letters painfully carved into the paper with successive jerks of the pencil, would not leave his mind. Nor would the substance of the letter, especially the Strength through Joy cruise. His imagination wandered, picturing the sort of German worker who would sail off for Lisbon.

  Dearest Schatzchen-Little Treasure-he wrote. I wish to invite you on a special outing arranged by my Kraft durch Freude club.

  He went on a bit with it, mawkish, blustering, then signed it Hans. Changed that to Hansi. Then tried Your Sweet Hansi. No, too much. Just Hansi would do.

  What would Marta do if she got such a letter? At first she’d think it was a practical joke, tasteless, upsetting. But what if he crafted it in such a way that he made it clear, to her, who was writing? Odile could drop it in a letter box in Hamburg, that would bypass the postal inspectors who processed all foreign mail. He could address it to her personally and sign with a meaningful alias. She could sail to Lisbon on such a cruise. He had to consider it carefully, a lot could go wrong.

  But, in principle, why not?

  The evening of 18 May was cool and cloudy, but the basement of the Rue Muret Synagogue was warm enough for the women in the audience to produce scented handkerchiefs from their shiny leather handbags. It was not, Szara discovered, an extremely Orthodox synagogue, nor was it quite as poor as it first seemed. Buried deep in the gloom of a twisting little street in the Marais, the building seemed to sag in every possible direction, its roofline jagged as though scribbled on paper. But the basement was packed with well-dressed men and women, probably parents of the children in the play, their relatives and friends. The women seemed more French than Jewish, and though Szara had taken the precaution of buying a yarmulke (let the Moscow Directorate reimburse him for that), there were one or two men in the audience with uncovered heads. Certain cars parked outside, half on the narrow pavement, indicated to Szara by their license plates that some members of the congregation were now doing well enough to live just outside Paris, but retained a loyalty to the old synagogue on the rue Muret, a street that retained a distinct flavor, and aroma, of its medieval origins.

  Szara expected to recognize the occupant of Seat 47 or 45, but the place to his right was more than filled by a bulky matron in diamond rings while to his left, on the aisle, sat a dark, teenage girl in a print dress. He had arrived early, been handed a playbill, and waited patiently for contact. But nobody showed up. Eventually, two droopy curtains creaked apart to reveal ten-year-old Pierre Berger, in cardboard armor, as Bar Kochba, the Jewish rebel of Judea in A.D. 132, in the act of recruiting his friend Lazar for service against the legions of the Emperor Hadrian.

  BAR KOCHBA (pointing at the roof): Look, Lazar! There, in the east. There it is!

  LAZAR: What do you see, Simon Bar Kochba?

  BAR KOCHBA: I see a star. Brighter than all others. A star out of Jacob.

  LAZAR: As in the Torah? “A star out of Jacob, a scepter out of Israel”?

>   BAR KOCHBA: Yes, Lazar. Can you see it? It means we shall free ourselves from the tyrant, Hadrian.

  LAZAR: Always you dream! How can we do this?

  BAR KOCHBA: By our faith, by our wisdom, and by the strength of our right hand. And you, Lazar, shall be my first recruit, but you must pass a test of strength.

  LAZAR: A test?

  BAR KOCHBA: Yes. Do you see that cedar tree over there? You must tear it from the earth to prove you are strong enough to join our rebellion.

  As Lazar strode across the stage to a paper cedar pinned to a clothes tree, a grandmother’s aside was stilled by a loud “Shhh!” Lazar, a stocky, red-cheeked-the makeup artist had been a little overenthusiastic with the rouge-child in a dark blue tunic, huffed and puffed as he struggled with the clothes tree. Finally, he lifted it high, shook it at Bar Kochba, and laid it carefully on its side.

  The play, A Star out of Jacob, proceeded as Szara, from his own days at the cheders in Kishinev and Odessa, knew it had to. A curious holiday, Lag b’Omer, commemorating a host of events all across the span of Jewish tradition and celebrated in a variety of ways. It was sometimes the Scholars’ Festival, recalling the death of Rabbi Akiva’s students in an epidemic, or the celebration of the first day of the fall of Manna as described in the Book of Exodus. It was a day when the three-year-old children of Orthodox Jews got their first haircuts or a day of weddings. But in Szara’s memory of eastern Poland, it was particularly the day that Jewish children played with weapons. Toy bows and arrows long ago, then, during his own childhood, wooden guns. Szara perfectly remembered the Lag b’Omer rifle that he and his father had carved from the fallen branch of an elm tree. Szara and his friends had chased each other through the mud alleys of their neighborhoods, street fighting, peering around corners and going “Krah, krah” as they fired, a fairly accurate approximation by kids who had heard the real thing.

  These children were different, he mused, more sophisticated, miniature Parisians with Parisian names: Pierre Berger, Moise Franckel, Yves Nachmann, and, standing out sharply from all the others, the stunning Nina Perlemere, as Hannah, inspiring the Bar Kochba rebels when they are reluctant to creep through the underground passages of Jerusalem to attack the legionnaires, sweeping her cardboard sword into the sky and slaying Szara entirely with her courage.

  HANNAH: Let there be no despair. First we will pray, then we will do what we must.

  This one, pretty as she was, was the warrior: her lines rang out and produced a scattering of spontaneous applause, causing a Roman centurion in the wings to peer around the curtain through blue-framed eyeglasses. There was a slight disturbance to Szara’s left as the dark girl in the print dress moved up the aisle and was replaced by General Yadomir Bloch. He reached over and took Szara’s left hand in his right for a moment, then whispered, “Sorry I’m late, we’ll talk after the play.” This produced a loud “Shh!” from the row behind them.

  Through the dark streets of the Marais, Bloch led him to a Polish restaurant on the second floor of a building propped up by ancient wooden beams braced against the sidewalk. The tiny room was lit by candles, not for atmosphere but-Szara could smell the kerosene they were using for the stove-because there was no electricity in the building. Squinting at the menu written in chalk on the wall, they ordered a half bottle of Polish vodka, bowls of tschav-sorrel soup-a plate of radishes, bread, butter, and coffee.

  “The little girl who played Hannah,” Bloch said, shaking his head in admiration. “There was one like that in Vilna when I was a boy, eleven years old and she drew every eye. You didn’t mind coming to the play? “

  “Oh no. It brought back the past. Lag b’Omer, playing guns.”

  “Perfect, yes, I intended it so. Soviet Man this, Soviet Man that, but we mustn’t forget who we are.”

  “I don’t think I ever forget, comrade General.”

  Bloch tore a strip of crust from the brown loaf, trailed it through his soup, leaned over his bowl to eat it. “No? Good,” he said. “Too many do. A little hint of pride in one’s heritage and somebody screams bourgeois nationalism! Take the Zionist away!” Having finished the bread, he wiped his mouth with a small cloth napkin, then began an expedition through his pockets, finally retrieving a folded page torn from a journal, which he opened carefully. “You know Birobidzhan?”

  “Yes.” Szara smiled grimly. “The Jewish homeland in Siberia- or so they insisted. Lenin’s version of Palestine, to keep the Zionists in Russia. I believe some thousands of people actually went there, poor souls.”

  “They did. A sad place, surely, but effective propaganda. Here, for instance, is a German Jew writing on the subject: ‘The Jews have gone into the Siberian forests. If you ask them about Palestine, they laugh. The Palestine dream will have long receded into history when in Birobidzhan there will be motorcars, railways and steamers, huge factories belching forth their smoke…. These settlers are founding a home in the taigas of Siberia not only for themselves but for millions of their people…. Next year in Jerusalem? What is Jerusalem to the Jewish proletarian? Next year in Birobidzhan!’ “

  Szara raised his glass in a mock Seder toast and drank off the vodka. Bloch folded his paper back up and put it in his pocket. “It would be funnier if people didn’t believe it,” Bloch said.

  Szara shrugged. “Bundists, communists, socialists left and right, three kinds of Zionists, and mostly, when all is said and done, people in the shtetls of the Pale who say do nothing, wait for the Messiah. We may not own anything to speak of, but we are wealthy when it comes to opinions.”

  “So, you must have one too.”

  Szara thought for a moment. “For centuries we have run around Europe like scared mice, maybe it’s time to at least consider a hole in the wall, especially lately, as the cat population seems to be on the rise.”

  Bloch seemed satisfied. “I see. Now, to a tender subject. You have, one is told, a splendid opportunity to write something for an American magazine, but nothing appears. Perhaps others counsel you not to do it. Maybe somebody like Abramov, a man you admire-a man I admire, come to that-convinces you that it’s not really worth it. He takes you under his protection, he solves your problems with the Georgians, he makes life possible. If it’s that, well, you’ve made a decision and, really, what can I do about it. On the other hand, maybe there’s something you need, maybe I can be of assistance. Or not. It’s for you to say. At worst, a little play from the synagogue youth group and a plate of nice tschav-not a wasted evening at any rate.”

  “Comrade General, may one ask a frank question?”

  “Of course.”

  “What, actually, is the nature of your business?”

  “That’s a good question, I’ll try to answer it. The truth is I’m in several businesses. Like you, like all of us, I was in the paradise business. We got rid of the czar and his pogroms to make a place where Jews, where everyone, could live like human beings and not like slaves and beasts-that’s one definition of paradise and not a bad one. This paradise, we soon saw, needed a few willing souls to serve as guardians. Isn’t that always the way with paradise? So I offered my humble services. Thus my second business, one could say, became the GRU, the military intelligence business. In this choice I was guided by the example of Trotsky, who became a soldier when he had to and did pretty well at it. And yet, even so, paradise slipped away. Because now we have a new pogrom, run, like so many in history, by a shrewd peasant who understands hatred, who knows its true value and how to use it.

  “There is a trick, Andre Aronovich, played on us through the centuries and now played again: the Jew is accused of being cunning, by someone a thousand times more cunning than any Jew has ever been. So, sorrowfully, this problem has become my third business, and now I’m taking you out to theater and dinner in a businesslike sort of way and trying to interest you in becoming an associate. What do I offer my associates? A chance to save a few Jewish lives, never a commodity with much value, but then Jews have always found their way to such enterprises-th
ey deal in cheap stuff: old rags, scrap metal, bones and gristle, whatever, like themselves, people don’t really want. And that’s all, frankly, that I can offer you. Is it dangerous? Oh yes. Could you die? It’s likely. Will your heroism be known to history? Very doubtful. Now, have I successfully persuaded you to throw everything you value in life away and follow this peculiar, ugly man over the nearest horizon to some dreadful fate? “

  General Bloch threw his head back and laughed-it was unfettered, infectious. Szara joined in, was then unable to stop. People at other tables turned to look at them, smiling nervously, a little frightened to be trapped in a tiny Polish restaurant with a pair of madmen. Neither of them could have explained it. They had, somehow, in this strange, hidden, broken building, caught the tail of absurdity, and the thrash of it made them laugh. “God forgive me,” Bloch said, wiping his eyes with his hand, “for enjoying such a life as much as I do.”

  A good laugh. A successful laugh. For it prevented Szara from actually having to answer Bloch’s question, from saying no immediately. Later they walked to the Metro together. Bloch kept coming back to the play. Oh the little girl who played the part of Hannah, what was her name? Perlemere? Yes, he was sure Szara had it right, a few months on the front lines and already he had the operative’s trained memory. Perlemere, mother-of-pearl, like Perlmutter in German. Where did Jews get these names? But, under any name at all, wasn’t she a treasure.

  Weren’t they all.

  Even those in Russia. Not so quick and clever as these children, perhaps, but bright and eager, little optimists, knock them down and they bounce. Szara surely knew them: the sons and daughters of the Jews in the universities, in the state bureaus and the diplomatic corps, yes, even in the security services.

  Those children. The ones who no longer had homes or parents. The ones who ate from garbage cans in the darkness.

  Long after Bloch left him, Szara continued the conversation with himself.

  A writer once again, Szara sat at his kitchen table at noon; through the open window he could smell lunch being cooked in the other apartments on the courtyard. When it was served, he could hear the sounds of knives and forks on porcelain and the solemn lilt of conversation that always accompanied the midday meal.