Dark Star ns-2

by Alan Furst

  “To talk, they said.”

  “Oh yes! I believe it!” He exhaled angrily and shook his head. “Shit.”

  “Their time will come,” Szara said.

  “Did you hear him? That cunt? ‘Please, may we speak a moment.’ ” Seneschal made the man sound effeminate and mincing.

  “That was a good idea, cutting across.”

  Seneschal shrugged. “I just did it.” He flicked his cigarette out the window and eased the Renault into first gear, turning the headlights back on. He swung left onto the deserted boulevard. “A bad neighborhood,” he said. “Nobody comes here at night.”

  They drove for five minutes, Szara spotted a Metro station on the corner. “Expect a contact by telephone. After that, our meetings will be as usual.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Seneschal said, voice mean and edgy. The brush with the Germans had frightened him. Now he was angry.

  The car stopped in midblock and Szara got out and closed the door behind him. He thrust his hands in his pockets, squeezing the roll of film to make sure of it, and walked quickly toward the Metro entrance. He reached the grillwork arch above the stairway, saw it was the Tolbiac station, stopped dead as a metallic explosion echoed off the buildings followed by the sound of shattered glass raining on the pavement. He stared at the noise. Two blocks away the Renault was bent around the front of a car that had plowed into the driver’s door. The passenger door was jammed open and something was lying in the street a few feet away from it. Szara started to run. Two men got out of the black car that had struck the Renault. One of them held his head and sat on the ground. The other ran to the thing in the street and bent over it. Szara stopped dead and found the shadows next to a building. Lights began to go on, heads appeared in windows. The glow of the street lamps was reflected in the liquid running into the street from the two cars, and the smell of gasoline reached him. The man who had been bending over the thing in the street squatted for a moment, seemed to be searching for something, then rose abruptly and kicked savagely at whatever it was that was lying there. People began to come out of their doorways, talking excitedly to each other. The man by the Renault now turned, took the other man under one arm and hauled him to his feet, pulling him forward, at last getting him to stumble along quickly. They disappeared up a side street across the boulevard.

  Walking quickly toward the cars, Szara found himself amid a small crowd of people. The Panhard’s windshield was starred on the right side, and the driver’s door on the Renault had been mashed halfway across the front seat by the impact. Seneschal lay face down near the Renault’s sprung passenger door, his jacket up over his head, shirttail pulled halfway out of his pants. A group of men stood around him, one bent down for a closer look, lifted the jacket, then straightened up, eyes shut in order not to see what he’d seen. He waved a dismissive hand across his body and said, “Don’t look.” Another man said, “Did you see him kick him?” The voice was quivering. “He kicked a dead man. He did. I saw it.”

  TRANSMISSION 11 JULY 1938 22:30 HOURS

  TO JEAN MARC: DIRECTORATE JOINS YOU IN REGRET FOR LOSS OF COMRADE SILO. INQUIRY TO BE UNDERTAKEN BY YVES WITH ASSISTANCE OF ELLI, A REPORT TO BE MADE TO DIRECTORATE SOONEST OF CIRCUMSTANCES PERTINENT TO THIS INCIDENT WITH SPECIAL REGARD TO PREVIOUS ACCIDENT INVOLVING FORMER DEPUTY. ESSENTIAL TO DETERMINE EXACT CIRCUMSTANCES OF BOTH THESE INCIDENTS WITH REGARD TO THEIR POSSIBLE INTENTIONAL ORIGIN. THE REMOTEST POSSIBILITY TO BE CONSIDERED. ALL OPAL PERSONNEL TO BE ON HIGHEST ALERT FOR HOSTILE ACTION AGAINST THE NETWORK.

  THERE IS GRAVE CONCERN FOR THE CONTINUITY OF THE ARBOR PRODUCT. SINCE HECTOR WAS PRESENT WHEN INITIAL CONTACT MADE BETWEEN ARBOR AND SILO, AND HECTOR HAS BEEN PRESENTED AS THE FRIEND OF SILO, CAN HECTOR FIND MEANS TO OPERATE AS SILO’S REPLACEMENT IN THIS RELATIONSHIP? HECTOR TO SHOW CONCERN AS FAMILY FRIEND AND PROVIDE COMFORT AS HE IS ABLE. IT IS SUGGESTED THAT SILO’S FUNERAL IS THE LOGICAL SETTING FOR CONTACT BETWEEN HECTOR AND ARBOR. ALTERNATIVELY, IF SILO’S TRUE POLITICAL AFFILIATION IS REVEALED, CAN PRESSURE BE BROUGHT TO BEAR ONARBOR? WILL ARBOR COOPERATE IN THIS CONTEXT? RESPOND BY 14 JULY.

  OTTER MUST BE PRESSED TO EXPAND HIS REPORTING. RECOMMEND NEW MEASURES TO BE TAKEN WITHIN 48 HOURS.

  ACCOUNT NO. 414-223-8/74 AT BANQUE SUISSE DE GENEVE TO BE CLOSED. NEW ACCOUNT NO. 609–846 DX 12 AT CREDIT LE-MANS OPERATIVE AS OF 15 JULY IN NAME COMPAGNIE ROMAILLES WITH CREDIT OF 50,000 FRENCH FRANCS. 10,000 FRANCS TO BE TAKEN BY COURIER TO YVES. DIRECTOR

  Sitting in the hot, dirty room where Kranov transmitted and decoded, Szara tossed the message aside. The frantic endgame attempted by the Directorate, their shrill tone, and the certainty of failure he found faintly depressing. He perfectly remembered the Andre Szara who would have been enraged by the Directorate’s calculating attitude, a man who, not so very long ago, believed passionately that the only unforgivable human sin was a cold heart. Now he was not that man. He understood what they wanted, understood them for wanting it, and knew the result: Lotte Huber was lost. Seneschal’s friend Valais, HECTOR, also a lawyer formerly active in the French Communist party, had been with Seneschal the night they’d “met” Huber and her friend at the theater, and had been brought on stage as a confidant-Lotte, he’s so worried and upset, you must help him-to move the operation along. But Huber would never accept him as a lover; this was analyst’s thinking, a scheme created at a great distance from events and in breathtaking ignorance of the personalities involved. Valais was a ponderous, contemplative man, a fair-skinned Norman lacking entirely Seneschal’s Mediterranean intensity and charm.

  And blackmail was absurd. Huber would go to pieces, bring the French police down on their heads. Moscow was clearly rattled: losing first the operative Szara had replaced, in an auto accident outside Macon, and now Seneschal in what had been presented to them as a second auto accident, a hit-and-run tragedy.

  For Szara had not told them otherwise.

  A pawn in khvost politics had become an active participant.

  Was he to inform the Directorate, and thus Dershani, of photographs taken in a Puteaux garden? A secret meeting of senior Soviet and German intelligence officers, perhaps of diplomatic importance, not so secret after all. Penetrated. Photographed. Maybe the Directorate knew of Dershani’s contact with the Nazi service.

  Maybe it didn’t.

  The Germans certainly wanted to keep the contact secret- they’d murdered Seneschal on that basis. So what would the NKVD have in store for him? He chose not to find that out, instead undertook a damage control program to protect himself, informing Schau-Wehrli that, according to Huber’s final report to Seneschal, the grand meeting had not yet taken place, and cabling both Goldman and Moscow to that effect.

  Odile, of course, presented a very different problem and he’d had to approach her directly. He’d gotten her off by herself and placed his life in her hands: there will be an investigation; you must not tell the Brussels rezident, or anybody, what you were doing on the days leading up to 9 July. He’d watched her, a tough Belgian girl from the mining towns, raw, nineteen, and loyal to the death once she got it straightened out what was what. She’d thought it over for quite some time. Her face, usually flip and sexy and moody all at once, was closed, immobile, he couldn’t read it. Finally, she’d agreed. She trusted him, instinctively, and perhaps she feared it was already too late to tell the truth. She also knew, from growing up within Communist party politics, that conspiracy was bread-and-butter to them all: you chose a side and lived with the result.

  The photographs had turned out to be adequate. He’d had them developed by randomly choosing a little shop, assuming the technician would make no particular sense of the subjects. Picking them up in midafternoon, he’d found an empty booth in a deserted cafe and spent an hour turning them over in his hands, cloudy black and white impressions shot from above, eleven prints paid for with a life. The crisp, young security man opening a gate. Head and shoulders of a man at the wheel of a car. Car window with a faint blur behind it. Dershani and the Gestapo officer in a garden, t
he German speaking tentatively, left hand turned up to emphasize a point.

  There was no photograph of the man with the cigar who drove the Panhard, Seneschal had not managed to record his own murderer.

  Now, what to do with them. He’d thought about that for a long time, then decided that if Bloch didn’t contact him he’d pass them to Abramov whenever an opportunity presented itself. Not officially, not through the system, friend to friend. Until then, he’d hide them in his apartment.

  As he thought about the photographs, the blacked-out room began to feel claustrophobic. A few feet away, facing the opposite wall, Kranov worked like a machine. The rhythmic tapping of his wireless key grated across Szara’s nerves, so he filed the Moscow cable in a metal box and left the house, walking out into the still night air and heading toward the canals. The slaughterhouse workers were hard at it on the loading docks of the abattoirs, hefting bloody beef quarters on their shoulders, then swinging them in to butchers who waited in the backs of their trucks. They cursed and laughed as they worked, wiping the sweat from their eyes, brushing the flies off their spattered aprons. In a brightly lit cafe, a blind man played the violin and a whore danced on a table while the raucous crowd teased him with lurid descriptions of what he was missing, and he smiled and played in such a way as to let them know he saw more than they did. Szara walked on the cobbled pathway by the canal, then stood for a time and watched the reflections of the neon signs, bending and bowing with the motion of the black water.

  To Seneschal, dead because of his, Szara’s, ignorance and inexperience, he could only give a place in his heart. He wondered if he’d ever learn how the Germans had managed it-the discovery of the surveillance, the tracking of the Renault while remaining invisible. Technically, they were simply more adept than he was-only the chance decision to use the Tolbiac Metro had saved his life- thus Seneschal was gone, and he was the one left to stare into the dead waters of the canal and think about life. His sentence was to understand that, and to remember it. To remember also, forever, the driver of the Panhard, a dim shape seen at a distance, barely the form of a man, then the savage kick, a spasm of useless rage. Sudden, without warning; like the blow that had knocked him to the floor of a railway station buffet in Prague. He watched the wavering signs in the water, red and blue, recalled what Seneschal had said about his girlfriend, the one who threw nothing away, the one for whom anything could be made to last a little longer.

  8 July.

  He took the night train to Lisbon.

  Sat up in coach, saving money, anticipating the cost of lovers’ feasts: iced prawns with mayonnaise, the wine called Barca Velha, cool from the cellar of the taberna. Then too, he did not want to sleep. Somewhere out on the ocean, he imagined, Marta Haecht was also awake. Avoiding the ghastly end-of-voyage parties she would be standing at the rail, watching for a landfall glow in the distance, only dimly aware of the Strength through Joy revelers braying Nazi songs in the ship’s ballroom. In her purse she would have the letter, carefully folded, something to laugh about in Portugal.

  Nothing so good for a lover as a train ride through the length of the night, the endless click of the rails, the locomotive sometimes visible in the moonlight as it worked its way around a long curve. All night long he summoned memories-Is there a place I may undress? The train pounded through the vineyards of Gascony at dawn. He stood in the alcove at the end of the car, watched the rails glitter as they swept below the coupling, smelled the burnt cinder in the air. It was cold in the foothills of the Pyrenees; the scent of pine resin sharpened as the sun climbed the slopes. Falangist Guardia in leather hats checked the passports at the Hendaye border crossing, then they were in Franco’s Spain all day long. They passed a burned-out tank, a raw lumber gallows standing at the edge of a town.

  The haze shimmered in the hills north of Lisbon. The city itself was numb, exhausted in the faded summer light of evening. The carriage horses at the station barely bothered to flick their tails. Szara found a hotel called the Mirador, with Moorish turrets and balconies, and took a room above a courtyard where a fountain gushed rusty water over broken tiles and heavy roses lay sodden in the heat. He put his toothbrush in a glass, then went out for a long walk, eventually buying a pair of linen pants, a thin white shirt, and a panama hat. He changed in the store and a Spanish couple asked directions of him on the way back to the hotel.

  He spotted a Russian emigre newspaper at a kiosk, then spent the night reading to the whirr of cicadas and the splashing of the cracked fountain. Stalin the Murderer! Prince Cheyalevsky Presents a Check to the Orphans’ League. Mme Tsoutskaya Opens Milliner’s Shop. At dawn, he forced the ancient shutters closed, but he could not sleep. He had not asked Goldman’s permission to leave Paris- he doubted it would have been granted; Seneschal’s death had everybody on edge-nor had he told Schau-Wehrli where he was going. Nobody knew where he was, and such freedom made it impossible to sleep. He wasn’t seriously missing, not yet. He gave himself a week for that; then they’d panic, start calling the morgue and the hospitals.

  Walking back to the hotel, he’d happened on a family of Jews: ashen faces, downcast eyes, dragging what remained of their possessions down the hill toward the docks. From Poland, he suspected. They’d come a long way, and now they were headed-where? South America? Or the United States?

  Would she go? Yes, eventually she would. Not at first, not right away-one didn’t just walk away from one’s life. But later, after they’d made love, really made love, then she would go with him. He could see her: head propped on hand, sweat between her breasts, brown eyes liquid and intense; could hear the cicadas, the shutter creaking in the evening breeze.

  He had money. Barely enough, but enough. They’d go to the American consulate and request visitors’ visas. Then they would vanish. What else was America but that, the land of the vanished.

  At ten the next morning he watched the docking of the liner Hermann Krieg-a Nazi martyr, no doubt. A crowd of German workers streamed down the gangplank, grinning at the brutal white sun they’d come to worship. The men leered at the dark Portuguese women in their black shawls, the wives took a firm grip on their husbands’ arms.

  Marta Haecht was nowhere to be seen.

  That summer, the heat spared nobody.

  And while London gardens wilted and Parisian dogs slept under cafe tables, New York positively steamed. ANOTHER SCORCHER, the Daily Mirror howled, while the New York Times said “Temperatures Are Expected to Reach 98deg Today.” It was impossible to sleep at night. Some people gathered on tenement stoops and spoke in low voices; others sat in the darkness, listened to Benny Goodman’s band on the radio, and drank gallons of iced tea.

  It was bad during the week, but the August heat wave seemed to save its truly hellish excesses for the weekends. You could take the subway to Coney Island or the long trolley ride to Jones Beach, but you could hardly see the sand for the bodies much less find a spot to spread out your towel. The ocean itself seemed warm and sticky, and a sunburn made everything worse.

  About the best you could hope for on the weekends was to own a little house in the country somewhere or, almost as good, to have an invitation to stay with somebody who did. Thus Herb Hull, senior editor at the magazine trying to make space for itself between the Nation and the New Republic, was elated to receive a Tuesday morning telephone call from Elizabeth May, asking him to come down with them on Friday night to their place in Bucks County. Jack May ran one of the Schubert box offices in the West Forties theater district, Elizabeth was a social worker at a Lower East Side settlement house. They were not Hull’s close friends, but neither were they simply acquaintances. It was instead something in between, a sort of casual intimacy New Yorkers often fell into.

  After the usual misadventures-a traffic jam in the Holland Tunnel, an overheating problem in the Mays’ ‘32 Ford outside Somerville, New Jersey-they reached a sturdy little fieldstone house at the edge of a small pond. The house was typical: small bedrooms reached by a staircase with a squeaky
step, battered furniture, bookcase full of murder mysteries left by former guests, and a bed in the guest room that smelled of mildew. Not far from Philadelphia, Bucks County had summer homes and artists’ studios up every dirt road. Writers, painters, playwrights, editors, and literary agents tended to cluster there, as did people who worked at a great range of occupations but whose evenings were committed to books and plays and Carnegie Hall. They arrived on Friday night, unloaded the weekend groceries (corn, tomatoes, and strawberries would be bought at roadside stands), ate sandwiches, and went to bed early. Saturday morning was spent fussing at projects that never got done-you just weren’t enjoying the country if you didn’t “fix” something-then the rest of the weekend drifted idly by in talking and drinking and reading in all their combinations. At Saturday night parties you’d see the same people you saw in Manhattan during the week.

  Herb Hull was delighted to spend the weekend with the Mays. They were very bright and well read, the rye and bourbon flowed freely, and Elizabeth was a fine cook, known for corn fritters and Brunswick stew. That’s what they had for dinner on Saturday night. Then they decided to skip the usual party, instead sat around, sipping drinks while Jack played Ellington records on the Victrola.

  The Mays were charter subscribers to Hull’s magazine and avid supporters of the causes it embraced. Not Party people but enlightened and progressive, fairly staunch for Roosevelt though they had voted for Debs in ‘32. The conversation all across Bucks County that night was politics, and the Mays’ living room was no exception. In unison, the three lamented the isolationists, who wanted no part of “that mess in Europe,” and the German-American Bund, which supported them, de facto encouragement to Hitler. Sorrowfully, they agreed that there was no saving the Sudetenland; Hitler would snap it up as he had Austria. There would eventually be war, but America would stay out. That was shameful, cowardly, ultimately frightening. What had become of American idealism? Had the grinding poverty of the Depression gutted the national values? Was the country really going to be run by Westbrook Pegler and Father Coughlin? Did the American people hate Russia so much they were going to let Hitler have his way in Europe?