by Alan Furst
“That’s the crux of it,” Jack May said angrily, shaking his head in frustration.
Hull agreed. It was all pretty sad stuff: Henry Ford and his anti-Semite pals, plenty of people down in Washington who didn’t want to get involved in Europe, the hate groups claiming that Roosevelt was “Rosenfeld,” a Bolshevik Jew. “But you know,” Hull said, “Stalin isn’t exactly helping matters. Some of the statements out of Moscow are pretty wishy-washy, and he’s got Litvinov, the foreign minister, running all over Europe trying to play the same sort of diplomacy game as England and France. That won’t stop Hitler, he understands the difference between treaties and tanks.”
“Ah for Christ sakes,” Jack May said. “You know the situation in Russia. Stalin’s got two hundred million peasants to feed. What’s he supposed to do?”
“Herb, weren’t you there this year? ” Elizabeth asked.
“Last winter.”
“What was it like? “
“Oh, secret and strange-you get the sense of people listening behind the drapes. Poor. Just not enough to go around. Passionate for ideas and literature. A writer there is truly important, not just a barking dog on a leash. If I had to put it in two words, I guess one would be inconvenient. Why I don’t know, but everything, and I do mean everything, is just so damn difficult. But the other word would have to be something like exhilarating. They’re really trying to make it all work, and you can definitely feel that, like something in the air.”
Jack May looked at his wife, a mock-quizzical expression on his face. “Did he have a good time?”
Elizabeth laughed.
“It was fascinating, that I can’t deny.”
“And Stalin? What do they think about him? ” she asked.
May took Hull’s glass from the coffee table and splashed some bourbon over a fresh ice cube. Hull took a sip while May turned the record over. ” They certainly watch what they say. You never know who’s listening. But at the same time they’re Slavs, not Anglo-Saxons, and they want to open their heart to you if you’re a friend. So you do hear stories.”
“Gossip?” May said. “Or the real thing?”
“Funny, they don’t gossip, not truly, not the way we do. They’re instinctively restrained about love affairs and such. As for ‘the real thing,’ yes, sometimes. I met one fellow who’s got a story about how Stalin was secretly in cahoots with the Okhrana. Pretty good story, actually-lively, factual. I think we’ll run it around Christmas.”
“Oh, that old red herring,” Elizabeth scoffed. “That’s been around for years.”
Hull chuckled. “Well, there you have the magazine business. It’ll make the Stalinists mad as hell, but they won’t cancel their subscriptions, they’ll just write letters. Then the socialists and the Trotskyites will write back, madder yet. We’ll sell some newsstand copies in the Village. In the long run it’s just dialogue, open forum, everyone gets to take their turn at bat.”
“But is this person actually in a position to know something like that?” Elizabeth was slightly wide-eyed at the possibility.
Hull thought for a time. “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll acknowledge, implicitly, that we really don’t know. ‘Who can say what goes on behind the walls of the Kremlin?’ Not quite so obvious as that, but in that general direction.”
“What are you? Time magazine?” May was getting ready to argue.
Hull shrugged it off. “I wish we had the Luces’ money. But I’ll tell you something, though it’s never to leave this room. We’re all of us, Time included, in the same boat. The editorial slant is different-is it ever-but we’re nothing without the readership, and we’ve just got to come up with something juicy once in a while. But don’t be alarmed, the rest of the issue will be as usual-plenty of polemic, snarling capitalists and courageous workers, a Christmas cry for justice. I think you’ll like it.”
“Sounds pretty damn cynical to me,” May grumbled.
Elizabeth rushed in. “Oh poo! Just think about the stuff they put on stage where you work. You’re just being critical, Jack, admit it.”
May smiled ruefully. “Democracy in action,” he said. “Makes everybody mad.”
It certainly made somebody mad.
On the night of 14 September the editorial offices of Hull’s magazine were burned, and “Who Was the Okhrana’s Mysterious Man? ” went up with all the other paper, or was presumed to have, because all they ever found were gray mounds of wet ash that went into the East River along with the chairs and desks and typewriters and, in the event, the magazine itself.
It was certainly no accident-the gasoline can was left right there on the floor of the editor-in-chief’s office, where the arson investigators found it when they picked through what remained of the ceiling. Some of the newspaper beatmen asked the Fire lieutenant who’d done it, but all he gave them was an eloquent Irish smile: these little commie outfits, how the hell was anybody going to know what went on, maybe a rival, maybe they didn’t pay the printer, the list was too long.
At first, the magazine’s board of directors thought they intended to go forward bravely, but wisdom ultimately prevailed. The venture had already eaten one trust fund and ruined a marriage, maybe they’d best leave the field to the competition. Herb Hull was on the street for exactly three weeks, then signed on with a glossy, general readership magazine, a big one. His new job was to go up against Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, which meant getting to know a whole new crowd of writers, but Hull, God help him, liked writers and soon enough he had the stories coming-“Amelia Earhart, Is She Still Alive?”-and life for him was back to normal. He had a pretty good idea of why the magazine office burned up but he kept it to himself-martyrdom was not in his stars-though he did sometimes play a little game with four or five names he could have jotted down if he’d wanted to.
Andre Szara found out a few days later. Standing at a zinc bar in the rue du Cherche-Midi, drinking his morning coffee, he thumbed through one of the official newspapers of the French left and read about the fire, obviously set, said its American correspondent, by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI or its fascist stooges, as part of their hate campaign against the progressive and peace-loving workers of all nations.
Szara felt little enough on reading it, simply a sense of recognition. He turned the event over in his mind for a time, staring out at the street. The purge was slowly dying out, like a fire that has consumed everything in its path and at last consumes itself: one week earlier, Goldman had quietly informed him during a meeting in Brussels that Yezhov was on the way out. What had actually happened? The NKVD had surely learned of the article and prevented its publication. But just as surely Stalin had been told-or seen the article himself, since they had likely stolen it before they set the fire. Had he been influenced? Jogged just enough in a certain way at a certain time so that ending the purge now seemed preferable to continuing it? Or was it simply coincidence, a confluence of events? Or was there yet more to the story than he knew? There was an excellent possibility that he had not been the only one set in motion against the purge; intelligence operations simply did not work that way-one brave man against the world. The expectation of failure was too high in any individual case for the skillful operator not to have several attacks going at once.
Finally, he couldn’t be sure of anything. Perhaps this morning I have actually been victorious, he thought. He could not imagine a greater absence of drums and trumpets. And he did not care. Since Seneschal’s death and his return from Lisbon he found he didn’t particularly care about anything, and he found also that this made life, or his life anyhow, much simpler. He finished the coffee, left a few coins on the bar, and headed off to a press conference with the Swedish ambassador, first putting up his umbrella, for it had begun to rain.
The Iron Exchange
10 October 1938.
Andre Szara, as long as he lived, remembered that day as a painting.
A curious painting. Quite literal, in the style of the 1880s yet touched by an incongruity, something aske
w, that suggested the surrealism of a later period. The subject was a long, empty beach near the Danish city of Aarhus on the coast of Jutland; the time was late afternoon, beneath the mackerel sky of the Scandinavian autumn, rows of white scud shifting slowly toward a pale wash horizon. To the east lay an expanse of flat, dark water, then a cloud bank obscuring the island of Samso. Small waves lapped at the shore; pebbly, dark sand with a meandering tideline marked by a refuse of broken shells. Gulls fed at the water’s edge, and on the dunes that rose behind the beach the stiff grass swayed in the offshore breeze. A common, timeless seascape caught at a common, timeless moment.
But the figures in the scene were alien to it. Sergei Abramov, in his dark blue suit and vest with watch chain, his black homburg and black beard and black umbrella-just there the painting had gone wrong. This was a city man who belonged to city places- restaurants, theaters-and his presence on the beach somehow denied nature. No less his companion, the journalist A. A. Szara, in a rumpled raincoat with a French newspaper rolled up in one pocket.
The final touch, which perfected the incongruity, was the stack of eleven photographs that Abramov held, studying them as people do, placing the topmost at the back when he was done with it, proceeding in turn until it reappeared, then starting over.
Could the artist have caught Abramov’s mood? Only a very good artist, Szara felt, could have managed it. There was too much there. Drawn deep inside himself, impervious to the screaming gulls, to the gust of wind that toyed with his beard, Abramov wore the expression of a man whose brutal opinion of humankind has, once again, been confirmed. But, in the cocked eyebrow, in the tug of a smile at one corner of the mouth, there was evidence that he expected no less, that he was a man so often betrayed that such events now seemed to him little more than an inconvenience. Very deliberately he squared the stack of photographs, resettled them in an envelope, and slid them into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Of course,” he said to Szara.
Szara’s expression showed that he didn’t understand.
“Of course it happened, of course it was Dershani who made it happen, of course the proof comes too late.” He smiled grimly and shrugged, his way of saying udari sudbi, the blows of fate, wasn’t this exactly the way of the world. “And the negatives?”
“Burned.”
“Sensible.”
“Will you burn these as well?”
Abramov thought a moment. “No,” he said. “No, I shall confront him.”
“What will he do? “
“Dershani? Smile. We will smile at each other: brothers, enemies, conspirators, fellow wolves. When we’ve got that over with, he’ll inquire how I came to have such photographs.”
“And you’ll tell him? “
Abramov shook his head. “I will tell him some rich, transparent lie. Which he will acknowledge with one of his predatory stares. I’ll stare back, though he’ll know that’s a bluff, and that will be that. Then, later, as if from nowhere, something may happen to me. Or it may not. Something may happen to Dershani instead-political fortune is a tide like any other. In any event, the photographs prove he was clumsy enough to get caught, perhaps a margin of vulnerability that will keep me alive a little longer. Or, perhaps, not.”
“I didn’t know,” Szara apologized. “I thought we’d caught him at it.”
“At what? “
“Collaboration.”
Abramov smiled gently at Szara’s innocence. “Such a meeting can be explained a thousand ways. For instance, one could say that Herr Joseph Uhlrich has now been brought under Soviet control.”
“You know him.”
“Oh yes, it’s a small world. The SS Obersturmbannfuhrer, to give him his proper rank, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel in Russia, is an old friend. A brave, fighting street communist in his youth, then a Brown Shirt thug, eventually a spy for Hitler’s faction, the Black Shirts, against Ernst Rohm. He took part in the Brown Shirt executions of 1934 and is now one of Heydrich’s assistants in the Sicherheitsdienst, SD, Gestapo foreign intelligence. He works in the Unterabteilung subdivision that concerns itself with Soviet intelligence services. Perhaps Dershani has been brought under the control of the SD rather than the other way around.”
“Uhlrich had the security, the Germans planned the meeting, Dershani was essentially alone and unguarded. To me, it seemed a courteous welcome for a traitor.”
Abramov shrugged. “I will find out.” He put his back to the wind, lit a cigarette, and put the extinguished match in his pocket. “But, even so, doing something about it may be impossible. Dershani is now chairman of the OPAL Directorate. Abramov is demoted to simple membership. He may be demoted further, even much further-you understand-and Yezhov is no longer Dershani’s superior. That position now belongs to the Georgian Beria, so the Georgian khvost is victorious. And they are cleaning house. A writers’ conspiracy has been uncovered; Babel, too friendly with Yezhov’s wife, has disappeared, and so has Kol’tsev. Pravda will soon have a new editor. Then there were others, many others: writers, poets, dramatists, as well as Yezhov’s associates, every single one of them, seventy at last count.”
“And Yezhov?”
Abramov nodded. “Ah yes, Yezhov himself. Well, I may inform you that Comrade Yezhov turned out to be a British spy. Imagine that! But, poor man, perhaps he was not fully aware of what he was doing.” Abramov closed one eye and tapped his temple with an index finger.
“Nicolai Ivanovich evidently went mad. For late one night an ambulance appeared at his apartment block, then two attendants, sturdy fellows, were seen to remove him in a straitjacket. He was taken to the Serbsy Psychiatric Institute and, regrettably, left alone in a cell, where he contrived to hang himself from the barred window by ingeniously fashioning his underpants into a noose. This would have required an extraordinary feat of acrobatics, and ‘the bloody dwarf was never known as much of an athlete, but, who knows, perhaps madness lent him unimagined physical prowess. We all like to think so, at any rate.”
“I was told that Yezhov was in decline,” Szara said, “but not this.”
“Decline could describe it, I suppose. Meanwhile, bratets”-the affectionate term meant “little brother”-“now more than ever, you better keep your nose clean. I don’t know what actually happened to your agent SILO in Paris, but here I see these photographs and they tell me you’ve been meddling with Germans, and so to put two and two together doesn’t take a genius.”
“But it was-”
“Don’t tell me,” Abramov interrupted. “I don’t want to know. Just understand that, once again, it’s a good time for Jews to be invisible, even in Paris. Beria is no shabbos goy-you know, a friend of the Orthodox Jews who turns the lights on and off on the sabbath so the prohibition against work is observed. Far from it. His most recent experience involved a man you may have known, Grisha Kaminsky, formerly people’s commissar for health. He came forward at the February Plenum and made a most interesting speech, claiming that Beria once worked for the Transcaucasian Muslims, the Mussavat nationalists, at a time when the British controlled them during the intervention at Baku, just after the revolution. According to Kaminsky’s speech, Beria was operating a Mussavatist counterintelligence network, and that made him a British spy. Needless to say, Kaminsky disappeared into thin air after the Plenum. So, you’ll understand I’m in no hurry to run to Beria with a story, even an illustrated story, that his khvost pal Dershani is in contact with the fascist enemy.”
Abramov paused to let it all sink in, and the two men stood silently on the beach for a time.
In Szara’s understanding, the ascendancy of Beria, despite Kaminsky’s near suicidal attack, confirmed what Bloch had said five months earlier: the purge, grinding, deliberate, somehow both efficient and random at once, was in effect a pogrom. He doubted that Abramov, as strong and as smart as he was, would survive it. And if Yezhov’s allies were murdered, Abramov’s friends would be treated no differently when the time came. “Perhaps, Sergei Jakobo-vich,” he said hesitantly
, “you ought to consider your personal safety. From Denmark, for instance, one can go virtually anywhere.”
“Me? Run? No, never. So far I’m just demoted, and I’ve absorbed that like a good ghetto zhid-eyes cast down, quiet as a mouse, no trouble from me, Gospodin, sir. No, what saves me is that with Hitler in the Sudetenland, Germany gains three and a half million people-all but seven hundred thousand of them ethnic Germans-easily four army divisions, the way we think, plus industrial capacity, raw materials, food, you name it. This adds up to one more big, strategic headache for Russia and, when all is said and done, that’s my business, and I’ve been in that business since 1917-it’s what I know how to do. So they’ll want to keep me around, at least for the time being.”
“And me too, they’ll want to keep around.”
“Oh very definitely you. After all, you operate an important mine for us-without you and your brethren the Directorate can produce nothing. We manufacture precision tools, at least we try to, but where would we be without iron ore? Which brings me to what I came here to talk about, I didn’t drag myself to some beach in Denmark just to get a pocketful of dirty pictures.
“The background is this: Hitler has the Sudetenland, we know he’s going for all of Czechoslovakia, we think he wants more, a lot more. If the OTTER material was significant, it’s now crucial, and the Directorate is going to have its way with this man whether he likes it or not. To that end, we’ve determined to send you to Berlin. This is dangerous, but necessary. Either you can talk OTTER into a more, ah, generous frame of mind or we’re really going to put the screws on. In other words, patience now exhausted. Understood? “
“Yes.”