by Alan Furst
He would write the story.
Then he would have to disappear. For, under NKVD scrutiny, a nom de plume would not protect him for long.
So, where did one disappear to these days? America. Shanghai? Zanzibar? Mexico?
No, America.
You met people in Moscow now and then who’d gone off to America-the ones who had come back to Russia. That little fellow who’d worked in a tie factory. What was his name? At some party somewhere they’d been introduced. Szara remembered a face soured by despair. “Hat in hand,” he’d said. “Always hat in hand.”
Szara was haunted by that image, and now it colored his vision of the future. He saw himself with Marta Haecht, they were hand in hand like fugitives in a storybook. The mad run from Paris at midnight, the steamship boarded at Le Havre. Ten days in steerage, the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island. New York! Vast confusion, adrift in a sea of hopes and dreams, the sidewalks jammed with his fellow adventurers, everybody could be a millionaire if they tried. The pennies scraped together for the new suit, the offices, editors, lunches, encouragements, high hopes, then, ultimately … a janitor.
A janitor with an alias. A nom de mop. A cartoon capitalist with a cigar loomed up before him: “You, Cohen, you call this floor clean? Lookit here! And here!” Hat in hand, always hat in hand. The obsequious immigrant, smiling and smiling, the sweat running from his armpits.
But what would he do in Shanghai? Or Zanzibar? Where, in fact, was Zanzibar? Or did it exist only in pirate movies?
On the table before him sat a secondhand Underwood, bought at a junk store, some vanished novelist’s golden calf, no doubt. Poor thing, it would have to be left on a street corner somewhere; it too would have to run away once it wrote forbidden words in its own, very identifiable handwriting. Szara stabbed idly at the keyboard with his index fingers, writing in Polish, putting in accents with a sharp pencil.
To the musical clatter of lunchtime in the courtyard, Andre Szara wrote a magazine story. Who was the Okhrana’s mysterious man? Certain documents are said to exist … revolutionary times in Baku … intrigue … rumors that won’t die … perhaps high in the Soviet government today … tradition of the agent provocateur, Roman Malinovsky who rose to be head of the Bolshevik party in the Russian Duma was known to have been an Okhrana agent and so was the engineer Azeff who actually led the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary party and personally organized the bomb assassination of the minister of the interior, Plehve, in 1904 … banished to Siberia … records said to have been burned in 1917, but did they get them all? Will we ever know for certain … secrets have a way … once the identity is known … that the course of history will once again be altered, perhaps violently, by the Okhrana’s mysterious man.
In personal code, Szara had the address in a little book. He found an envelope and typed across the front Mr. Herbert Hull, Editor, and the rest of it. The following morning would be time enough to put it in the mail. One always liked to let these articles settle a bit, to see later on, with fresh eyes, what might need changing.
That evening he took a long walk. If nothing else, he owed himself some serious thinking. Perhaps he was letting fate decide, but, if he was, it did. Paris chose that night to be rather a movie of itself. An old man was playing a concertina and a few aristocrats were dancing in the street-the French were tight as fiddle strings until they decided to let loose, and then they could be delightfully mad. Or, perhaps, it was a day for some special little ritual-they arrived frequently and Szara never knew exactly what was going on- when everybody was expected to do the same thing: eat a particular cake, buy a prescribed bouquet, join open-air dancing on the boulevards. Some street corner toughs; wide jackets, black shirts, white ties, their shoulders hunched a certain way, beckoned him over, then stood him a Belgian beer at a corner bar. A girl with blond hair flowing like the wind floated by him and said some deliciously indecipherable thing. It made him want the girl in Berlin- to live such a night unshared was a tragedy. It stayed light forever, a flight of little birds took off from the steeple of a church and fled northward past the red-stained clouds in a fading sky. So lovely it hurt. He walked past the Sante prison, looked up at the windows, wondered who might be watching this same sky, could taste the freedom in his own life. He stopped for a sausage in a small French bread, bought from an old lady in a windowed booth. The old lady gave him a look, she knew life, she had him figured out, she knew he’d do the right thing.
Odile returned from her courier run on 12 June. The product generated by the Berlin networks, as well as OTTER material from Dr. Baumann, was photographed on microfilm in the basement of a Berlin butcher shop; the spool was then sewn into the shoulder pad of Odile’s suit jacket for the German border crossing and the train ride back to Paris. By the morning of 13 June the film had been developed, and Szara, working at the rue Delesseux house, had an answer to his carefully phrased-peripheral data, he’d been told to call it, as though nobody really cared-request for identification of Baumann Milling office workers and sketches of their personalities. Baumann’s response was brusque:
FINAL PRODUCTION FOR MAY WAS 17715. WE PROJECT JUNE AT 20588 BASED ON ORDERS AT HAND. THE OTHER DATA YOU REQUEST IS NOT PER OUR AGREEMENT. OTTER.
Szara was not pleased by this rejection but neither was he surprised. A week earlier, he’d made a day trip to Brussels and conferred with Goldman, a discussion that had prepared him for what the rezident suspected might happen, and set up his return message. This he wrote on a sheet of paper that would find its way to Baumann on Odile’s next trip to Berlin:
WE HAVE RECEIVED YOUR MAY/JUNE FIGURES AND ARE APPRECIATIVE AS ALWAYS. ALL HERE ARE CONCERNED FOR YOUR CONTINUED HEALTH AND WELL-BEING. THE ANNOTATED LIST IS NEEDED TO ASSURE YOUR SECURITY AND WE URGE YOU STRONGLY TO COMPLY WITH OUR REQUEST FOR THIS INFORMATION. WE CAN PROTECT YOU ONLY IF YOU GIVE US THE MEANS TO DO SO. JEAN MARC.
Untrue, but persuasive. As Goldman put it, “Telling somebody that you’re protecting him is just about the surest way to help him see that he’s threatened.” Szara looked up from his plate of noodles and asked if it in fact were not the case that Baumann was in peril. Goldman shrugged. “Who isn’t?”
Szara took another piece of paper and wrote a report to Goldman, which would then be retransmitted to Moscow. He assumed that Goldman would, in the particular way he chose to put things, protect himself, Szara, and Baumann, in that order. The message to Goldman went to Kranov for encryption and telegraphy late that night.
Szara checked his calendar, made a note of Odile’s 19 June courier run, Moscow’s incoming transmission, and his next meeting with Seneschal-that afternoon, as it happened. He squashed out a cigarette, lit another. Ran his fingers through his hair. Shook his head to clear it. Times, dates, numbers, codes, schedules, and somebody might die if you made a mistake.
New piece of paper.
He’d acquired from the Lisbon port authority the expected arrival date, 10 July, of a Strength through Joy cruise from Hamburg. Figuring from Odile’s 19 June courier mission, he saw that Marta could just make it if there was room on the boat. For an hour he worked on the letter. It had to be sincere; she had great respect for honesty of a certain kind, yet he knew he mustn’t gush. She would hate that. He tried to be casual, let’s enjoy ourselves, and romantic, I do need to be with you, at the same time. Difficult. Suddenly he sat bolt upright. How on earth could he find a German stamp in Paris? He would have to ask Odile to buy one when she got off the train in Berlin. Should he confide in her? No, better not. He was the deputy director of the net, and this was simply another form of communication with an agent. Even love had become espionage, he thought, or was it just the times he lived in? That aside, when was his meeting with Seneschal? Where was it? He had it written down somewhere. Where? Good God.
4:20 P.M. The racetrack at Auteuil. By the rail, facing the entrance to Section D. A well-conceived location for a treff-shifting crowds, anonymous faces-except if it was raining, which it was. Szara saw imm
ediately that he and Seneschal would wind up standing together, isolated, in the view of thousands of people with sense enough to move into the shelter of the grandstand.
Such tradecraft, he thought, whistling loudly to catch Seneschal’s attention as he emerged from the entry gate. Silently they climbed to the last row of the grandstand as a few horses splattered mud on each other at the far turn of the oval track. “Allez you shithead,” said a dispirited old man in an aisle seat.
Szara was by nature acutely aware of shifts in mood, and he sensed Seneschal’s discomfort right away. The lawyer’s tousled hair was soaked, a damp cigarette hung from his lips-nobody liked getting wet, but there was more to it than that. His face was pale and tense, as though something had broken through his insouciant defenses and drained his optimism.
For a time they watched galloping horses, a primitive loudspeaker system crackled and popped, the muffled voice of an excited Frenchman could just barely be made out as he called the race.
“A difficult weekend with Fraulein? ” Szara asked, not unsympathetically. He had a hunch that the romantic trip to Normandy had gone wrong.
A Gallic shrug, then, “No. Not so bad. She gives herself like a woman in love-anything at all to please since nothing between lovers can be wrong. If she feels I’m not sufficiently passionate she gets up to tricks. You’re a man, Jean Marc, you know.”
“It can’t always be easy,” Szara said. “Humans aren’t made of steel, and that includes communists.”
Seneschal watched eight new horses being led out into the rain.
“Shall we give you a little breathing space? Perhaps a notional journey, something to do with the Foreign Office. The crisis in Greece.”
“Is there one?”
“Usually.”
Seneschal grunted, not terribly interested. “She wants to get married. Immediately.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t use a …”
“No. It’s not that. She thinks she’s to be dismissed from her position, sent back to Germany in disgrace. Last weekend, after we’d done with all the little shrieks and gasps, there were tears. Floods. She turned bright red and puffed up. It rained like a bastard up there. All weekend the stuff ran down the windows. She bawled, I tried to comfort her but she was inconsolable. Now, she says, only marriage can keep her in France, with me. As for my job at the Foreign Office and the information she’s provided, well, too bad. We will live on love, she says.”
“Did she explain? “
“She gabbled like a goose. What I can make of it is that her boss, Herr Stollenbauer, is under severe pressure. Lotte spent all last week running around Paris in taxis-and she claims she’s frightened of Parisian cab drivers-because no Mission cars were available. She says she hunted through every fancy shop in the city, Fauchon, Vigneau, Rollet, the finest traiteurs you see, in search of what she calls Rote Grutze. Do you know what that is? Because I don’t.”
“A sort of sweetened sauce. Made of red berries,” Szara said.
“Also, they’re trying to rent a house, somewhere just outside Paris. In Suresnes or Maisons-Laffitte, places like that. According to her they’re more than willing to pay, but French proprietaries take their time, want papers signed, bank guarantees, first this, then that. It’s ceremonial, drives the Germans crazy; they just want to wave money about and get what they want. They think the French are venal-they aren’t wrong but they don’t understand how French people worry about their properties. From her stories I gathered, more or less, that this is what’s going on. And the worse it gets, the more Stollenbauer feels the pressure, the more he shouts at her. She isn’t used to that, so now the answer is to get married, she’ll stay in France, and I suppose tell Stollenbauer off in the bargain.”
“Somebody’s coming to Paris.”“Evidemment.”
“Somebody with an aide to call up and say, ‘Oh yes, and make sure the man’s Rote Grutze sauce is available when he eats his pannkuchen.’ “
“Shall one go to the forest and pick red berries?”
To Szara’s horror, Seneschal was not at all sarcastic. “Not to worry,” he said sternly. Seneschal was clearly in the process of wilting. He was physically brave, Szara knew that for a fact, but the prospect of daily married life with Huber had unnerved him. Szara spoke with authority: “It’s the Frenchwoman of your dreams you’ll marry, my friend, and not the Fraulein. Consider that an order.”
The new information was provocative. Szara’s old instincts-the journalist happening on a story-were sharply aroused. Suddenly the horses churning through the mud seemed triumphant, images of victory: their nostrils flaring, flanks shining with kicked-up spray. The business with the Rote Grutze sauce was curious, but the search for a safe house, that was truly interesting. Trade Missions didn’t acquire safe houses. That was embassy business, a job undertaken by resident intelligence officers. But the embassy was being circumvented, which meant a big secret, and a big secret meant a big fish, and guess who happened to be standing there with a net. Cameras, he thought, just every kind of camera.
He made a decision. “Huber won’t be fired,” he said. “It’s to be quite the opposite. Stollenbauer will be crawling at her feet. And as for you, your only problem will be a woman in triumph, a star of stage, screen, and radio, a princess. Demanding, I think, but not something you can’t deal with.”
Fully mobilized, Szara’s web of contacts had an answer within days.
An Alsatian traiteur was located; a smiling Lotte Huber left his shop trailed by a taxi driver struggling under the weight of two cases of Rote Grutze sauce in special crocks of the Alsatian’s own design. He was also prepared to offer weisswurst, jaegerwurst, freshly cured sauerkraut subtly flavored with juniper berries because-and here the rosy-cheeked traiteur leaned over the counter and spoke an exquisitely polite German-“a man who favors Rote Grutze will always, always, madame, want a hint of juniper in his sauerkraut. This is an appetite for piquancy. And this is an appetite we understand.”
Schau-Wehrli dismissed the house dilemma with an imperious Swiss flick of the hand. Her progressive friends and colleagues at the International Law Institute were sounded out and a suitable property was soon located. It was in Puteaux, a step or two from the city border, a dignified, working-class neighborhood near the Citroen loading docks on the southwestern curve of the Seine: everywhere a grim, sooty brown, but boxes of flowers stood sentry at all the parlor windows, and the single step up to each doorway was swept before eight every morning. At the far edge of the district sat a three-story, gabled brick residence-the home of a doctor now deceased and the subject of an interminable lawsuit-with a high wall covered in ivy and a massive set of doors bound in ironwork. A bit of a horror, but the ivied wall turned out to hide a large, formal garden. Sheets were removed from the furniture, a crew of maids brought in to freshen up. Terra-cotta pots were placed by the entryway and filled to overflowing with fiery geraniums.
Stollenbauer was, as Szara had predicted, magically relieved of much of his burden. The pending visit still made him nervous, much could go wrong, but at least he now felt he had some support. From chubby little Lotte Huber no less! Had he not always said that someday her light would shine? Had he not always sensed the hidden talent and initiative in this woman? She’d been so clever in finding the house-where his pompous assistants had shouted guttural French into the phone, cunning Lotte had taken the feminine approach, spending her very own weekend time wandering about various neighborhoods and inquiring of women in the marketplace if they knew of something to rent, not too much legal folderol required.
Meanwhile, Szara arrayed his forces and played his own office politics. Oh, Goldman was informed, he had to be, but the cable was a masterpiece of its genre-Trade Mission apparently expecting important visitor sometime in near future, item eight of seventeen items, not a chance under heaven that such a phrase would bring the greedy rezident swooping down from Brussels to snaffle up the credit.
Using a copy of the house key, Szara and Senescha
l had a look around for themselves one evening. Szara would have dearly loved to record the proceedings, but it would simply have been too dangerous, requiring a hidden operative running a wire recorder. Then too, important visitors usually had security men in attendance, people with a horror of unexplained ridges under carpets, miscellaneous wires, even fresh paint.
Instead they approached a birdlike little lady, the widow of an artillery corporal, who lived on the top floor of the house across the street and whose parlor window looked out over the garden. A troublesome affair, they told her; a wayward wife, a government minister, the greatest discretion. They showed her very official-looking identity documents with diagonal red stripes and handed over a crisp envelope stuffed with francs. She nodded grimly, perhaps an old lady but a little more a woman of the world than they might suppose. They were welcome to her window; it was a change to have something going on in this dull old street. And did they wish to hear a thing or two about the butcher’s wife?
Stollenbauer summoned Lotte Huber to his office, sat her down on a spindly little chair, rested his long fingers lightly on her knee, and told her, in strictest confidence, that their visitor was an associate of Heydrich himself.
Seneschal had walked Lotte Huber through the “discovery” of the safe house and the Rote Grutze sauce and counseled how these successes should be explained. And what thanks did he get? The young woman’s new sense of pride and achievement made her shut up like a clam. Under Szara’s tutelage, he applied pressure every way he could. Told her the big job was now open at the Foreign Office- would he get it, or would his sworn enemy? Only she could help him now.
He took her to dinner at Fouquet’s, fed her triangles of toast covered thickly with goose liver pate and a bottle of Pomerol. The wine made her cute, funny, and romantic, but not talkative. Finally they fought. What use, she wanted to know, had the French Foreign Office for information that an associate of Heydrich’s was coming to town for an important meeting? That was the very sort of thing that interested them, he said. The big cheese in his office was secretly a great admirer of Hitler and could be counted on to help, quietly, if any more problems developed with the meeting. But he had to be told exactly what was going on. No, she said, stop, you begin to sound like a spy. That made Seneschal pale and Szara even paler when the conversation was reported. “Apologize,” Szara said. “Tell her you were overwrought and”-he reached into a pocket and came forth with francs-“buy her jewelry.”