by Alan Furst
“Also, we want you to deliver money to the RAVEN network, to RAVEN herself. Take a good look at her; you’re going to be asked for your views when you return to Paris. The Directorate has faith in Schau-Wehrli, please don’t misunderstand, but we’d like a second opinion.”
“Will Goldman supply passports for the trip?”
“What passports? Don’t be such a noodle. You go as yourself, writing for Pravda, on whatever takes your fancy. Goldman will discuss with you the approach to OTTER and to RAVEN, and you’ll work with him on questionnaires-we want you to guide OTTER into very particular and specific areas. Questions?”
“One.”
“Only one?”
“Why were you sent all this way? The ‘third country’ meeting is usually reserved for special circumstances-you taught me that- and I haven’t heard anything, anything official that is, that couldn’t have been communicated by wireless. Am I missing something?”
Abramov inhaled deeply and acknowledged the impact of the question with a sigh that meant look how smart he’s getting. “Briefly, they’re not so sure about you. You haven’t made headway with OTTER, you lost an agent-even if that wasn’t your fault, the Directorate doesn’t excuse bad luck-and your one great triumph, which I now have in my pocket, is unknown to them. To be blunt, your credit is poor. So they wanted me to have a look at you, and make a decision about whether or not you should continue.”
“And if not? “
“That’s not the decision, so don’t be too curious. Now I used a car to get here, but I want you to leave first. You’ve got about a half-hour walk back into Aarhus, so you’ll forgive me if I pass you on the road like I never saw you. Last word: again I remind you to be very careful in Berlin. Your status as a correspondent protects you, but don’t go finding out how far. When you contact agents, follow procedure to the letter. As for all the chaos in Moscow, don’t let it get you down. No situation is as hopeless as it appears, Andre Aronovich-remember the old saying: nobody ever found a cat skeleton in a tree.”
They said good-bye and Szara struggled up the soft sand to the top of the dunes. Looking back, the sense of the scene as a painting returned to him. Sergei Abramov, umbrella hooked on one forearm, hands thrust in pockets, stared out to sea. The autumn seascape surrounded him-crying gulls, incoming waves, the rustling beach grass, and pale-wash sky-but he was alien to it. Or, rather, it was alien to him, as though the idea of the painting was that the solitary figure on the shore was no longer part of life on earth.
27 October 1938.
Such visions did not leave him.
A fragment of bureaucratic language, date of expiry, the sort of phrase one saw on passports, visas, permits of every kind, became his private symbol for what was essentially a nameless feeling. Europe is dying, he thought. The most commonplace good-bye had an undertone of farewell. It was in the songs, in the faces in the streets, in the wild changes of mood-absurd gaity one moment, desolation the next-he saw in friends and in himself.
The dining car on the Nord Express to Berlin was nearly deserted, the vibrations of stemware and china at the empty tables far too loud without the normal babble of conversation. An elderly waiter stood half asleep at his station, napkin draped over one arm, as Szara forced himself to eat a lukewarm veal chop. When the train approached the border, an officious porter came through the car lowering the window shades, presumably denying Szara and one other couple a view of French military fortifications.
And the passport control in Germany was worse than usual. Nothing he could exactly put his finger on, the process was the same. Perhaps there were more police, their sidearms more noticeable. Or perhaps it was in the way they moved about, bumping into things, their voices a little louder, their intonations not so polite, something almost exultant in their manner. Or it might have been the men in suits, sublimely casual, who hardly bothered to look at his documents.
Or was he, he asked himself, merely losing his nerve? There had been no horrid Chinese food in Brussels this time. He’d spent hours in the back office of Stefan Leib’s cartography shop, where Goldman had inflicted on him a series of exhausting, repetitious briefings that often lasted well past midnight. This was a different Goldman, leaning over a cluttered desk in the glow of a single lamp, voice tense and strained, breath sharp with alcohol, slashing pencil lines across a street map of Berlin or explaining, in sickening detail, the circumstances in which Dr. Baumann now found himself.
The situation for German Jews had deteriorated, but far worse was the form the deterioration took. There was something hideously measured about it, like a drum, as some new decree appeared every month, each one a little worse than the last, each one inspiring, and clearly meant to inspire, its victims with a terrifying sense of orchestration. Whatever ruled their destiny simply refused to be placated. No matter how precisely and punctually they conformed to the minutiae of its rules, it grew angrier and more demanding. The more they fed it, the hungrier it got.
In April of 1938 only forty thousand Jewish firms remained in Germany; all others had passed to Aryan ownership, sometimes for a nominal fee, sometimes for nothing. Those businesses that remained under Jewish control either brought in foreign currency, which Germany desperately needed to buy war materials or, like Baumann Milling, were directly connected to rearmament efforts.
In June, Jews had to provide an inventory of everything they owned, with the exception of personal and household goods.
In July, a glimmer of hope, a conference on Jewish emigration held at the French spa town of Evian, where representatives of the world’s nations met to consider the problem. But they refused to take in the German Jews. The United States would accept only twenty-eight thousand, in severely restricted categories. Australia did not wish to import “a racial problem.” South and Central American countries wanted only farmers, not traders or intellectuals. France had already accepted too many refugees. Britain claimed not to have space available, and immigration to British-controlled Palestine was sharply curtailed to a few hundred certificates a month since Arab riots and ambushes-beginning in 1936-had created political difficulties for those who favored letting Jews into the country. In addition, British access to oil in the Middle East was based on the maintenance of good relations with the Arab sheikdoms, and they were in general opposed to Jewish settlement in Palestine. Of all the nations convened at Evian, only Holland and Denmark would accept Jewish refugees who could leave Germany. By the end of the conference, most German Jews understood they were trapped.
The decrees did not stop. On 23 July, all Jews were required to apply for special identification cards. On 17 August it was ordered that Jews with German given names would have to change them- male Jews now to be known as Israel, females to be called Sarah. On 5 October, Jews were forced to hand in their passports. These would be returned, they were told, with an entry identifying the holder as a Jew.
As the train sped through the Rhine valley toward Dusseldorf, Szara raised the window shade and watched the little clusters of village lights go by. He consciously tried to free his mind of Goldman’s briefing and to concentrate on the likelihood of seeing Marta Haecht during his time in Berlin. But even in his imagination she lived in the shadow of her city, a very different Marta than the one he had believed was rushing to meet him in Lisbon. Perhaps she was nothing at all like his construction of her. Was it possible that she existed only in a fantasy world he’d built for himself? It did not matter, he realized, letting his head rest against the cold glass of the window. Whatever she might be, he ached for her presence, and this need was the single warmth that survived from the time when he’d believed the whole world lived for desire. Otherwise, there was only ice.
The journalist Szara got off the train at Potsdam station a few minutes after three in the morning, woke a taxi driver, and was taken to the Adlon, where all Russian journalists and trade delegations stayed. The hotel, musty and creaky and splendidly comfortable, was on Pariser Platz at the foot of the grandiose avenue Unter den Linden, next to
the British embassy and three doors down from the Russian embassy. Trailing a sleepy porter down the long hall to his room, Szara heard exuberant, shouted Russian and the crash of a lamp. Home at last, he thought. The old man carrying his bag just shook his head sorrowfully at the uproar.
In the morning he saw them, groping toward coffee in the elegant dining room. Tass correspondents, officially, a range of types- from the broad-shouldered, fair-haired, and pale-eyed to the small, intense ones with glasses and beards and rumpled hair. Nobody he knew, or so he thought, until Vainshtok materialized at his table with a dish of stewed figs. “So, now Szara arrives. Big news must be on the way.” Vainshtok, son of a timber merchant from Kiev, was infamously abrasive. He had wildly unfocused eyes behind round spectacles and a lip permanently curled with contempt. “Anyhow, welcome to Berlin.”
“Hello, Vainshtok,” he said.
“So pleased you have chosen to honor us. I have to file on everything, up half the night. Now you’re here maybe I get a break now and then.”
Szara gestured inquisitively toward the Tass reporters scattered about the dining room.
“Them? Ha!” said Vainshtok. “They don’t actually write anything. You and me, Szara, we have to do the work.”
After breakfast he tried to phone Marta Haecht. He learned she’d left the magazine two months earlier. He tried her home. Nobody answered.
The day before he left Paris, Kranov had handed him a personal message from Brussels:
THE WORK HAS BEEN COMPLETED FOR YOUR ASSIGNMENT. HAVE A SAFE AND PRODUCTIVE JOURNEY. REZIDENT.
In Berlin, on the night of 28 October, Andre Szara understood what that message truly meant. Of those who undertook the work, he knew only one, Odile, whose 26 October dead-drop deposit for OTTER had warned of a visit from a friend who would arrive at night. The greatest part of the preparation, however, had been managed by nameless, faceless operatives-presumably stationed in Berlin, though he could not be certain of that. Perhaps some of the Tass reporters seen stumbling toward their morning coffee at the Adlon, perhaps a team brought in from Budapest; he was not to know. Once again, the unseen hand.
But the Andre Szara moving toward a clandestine meeting in Gestapo territory was more than grateful for it. He entered the Grunewald neighborhood in the gathering dusk, leaving the Ringbahn tram stop with a few other men carrying briefcases and indistinguishable from them. Most of the residents of the Grunewald came and went by automobile, many of them chauffeured. But the evening return from business was as much cover as the operatives had been able to devise, and Szara was thankful for even that minimal camouflage.
The Baumann villa faced Salzbrunner street, but he was going in the back way. Thus he walked briskly up Charlottenbrunner, slowed to let one last returning businessman find his way home, crossed a narrow lane, then counted steps until he saw a rock turned earth side up. Here he entered a well-groomed pine wood- at the blind spot the operatives had discovered, away from the view of nearby houses-found the path that was supposed to be there, and followed it to the foot of a stucco wall that enclosed the villa adjoining the Baumann property.
Now he waited. The Berlin weather was cold and damp, the woods dark, and time slowed to a crawl, but they’d hidden him here to accommodate an early entry into the neighborhood, at dusk, and now kept him on ice to await the magic hour of nine o’clock, when the servant couple who occupied the main residence on the Baumann property were known to go to sleep-or at least turn off their lights. At ten minutes after nine he set out, feeling his way along the wall and counting steps until, just where they said it would be, he found a foothold that an operative had dug into the stucco facing. He put his left foot into the small niche, drove his weight upward, and grabbed the tiled cap of the wall. He’d been told to wear rubber-soled shoes, and the traction helped him as he scrabbled his feet against the smooth surface. It wasn’t graceful, but he eventually lay flat on the corner formed by the wall he’d climbed and that which divided the two properties.
Looking down to his left, he saw a woman in a flowered robe reading in a chair by the window. To his right, the servants’ cottage had its blinds drawn. Just below, a garden shed stood against the wall-he cautiously lowered himself to its shingle roof, which gave unpleasantly under the strain but held until he hopped off. From the cottage came the high-pitched barking of a small dog- that would be Ludwig, the apparat mechanism for moving Baumann out into the neighborhood at night-which was almost immediately calmed. Staying out of sight of the villa itself, he found the back door of the cottage and knocked lightly three times- not a signal, but a style recommended by Goldman as “informal” and “neighborly.” The door opened quickly and Dr. Baumann let him in.
The operatives had gotten him safely inside. Somebody, shivering in the Berlin mist at dawn, had dug a piece out of the wall with a clasp knife-or however it had been done, by twelve-year-olds for all he knew-anyhow, he was in. He had been maneuvered, like a weapon, into a position where his light, his intellect, influence, craft, whatever it was, could shine.
They’d done their job. Pity he couldn’t do his.
Oh, he tried. Goldman had said, “You must control this man. You can be courteous, if you like, or lovable. Threats sometimes work. Be solemn, patriotic, or just phenomenally boring-this too has been done-but you must control him.” Szara couldn’t.
Dr. Julius Baumann was gray. The brutal, ceaseless pressure orchestrated by the Reich bureaucracies was proceeding quite successfully in his case. His face was ruined by tension and lack of sleep; he had become thin, stooped, old. “You cannot know what it’s like here.” This he said again and again, and Szara could find no way through it. “Can we help you?” he asked. “Do you need anything?” Baumann just shook his head, somehow closed off behind a wall that no such offer could breach.
“Be positive,” Goldman had said. “You represent strength. Make him feel the power you stand for, let him know it supports him.”
Szara tried: “There’s little we can’t do, you know. Your account with us is virtually unlimited, but you must draw on it.”
“What is there to want?” Baumann said angrily. “What they’ve taken from me you cannot give back. Nobody can do that.”
“The regime is weakening. Perhaps you can’t see it, but we can. There’s reason to hope, reason to hang on.”
“Yes,” Baumann said, the man who will agree to anything because he finds the argument itself tiresome. “We try,” he added. But we do not succeed, his eyes said.
Frau Baumann had changed in a different way. She was now more hausfrau than Frau Doktor. If in fact it was her pretensions- the desire for social prominence and the need to condescend-that had driven a nation of fifty million people into a blind fury, she had certainly been cured of all that. Now she fussed and fiddled, her hands never still. She had reduced her existence to a series of small, household crises, turned fear into exasperation with domestic life; thimbles, brooms, potatoes. Perhaps it was her version of the world in which the common German housewife lived, perhaps she hoped that by joining the enemy she could keep-they would allow her to keep-what remained of her life. When she left the room, Baumann followed her with his eyes. “You see?” he whispered to Szara, as though something needed to be proved.
Szara nodded sorrowfully; he understood. “And work? ” he asked. “The business? What’s it like there? How do they feel about you, your employees. Still faithful? Or do most of them follow the party line? “
“They look out for themselves. Everybody does, now.”
“No kindness? Not one good soul?”
Perhaps Baumann wavered for an instant, then realized what came next-just who is that good soul-and said, “It doesn’t matter what they think.”
Szara sighed. “You refuse to help us. Or yourself.”
Something flickered in Baumann’s eyes-a strange kind of sympathy? Then it was gone. “Please,” he said, “you must not ask too much of me. I am less brave every day. Going to the stone wall for the message is
an agony, you understand? I make myself do it. I-”
The telephone rang.
Baumann was paralyzed. He stared through the doorway into the kitchen while the phone rang again and again. Finally Frau Baumann picked up the receiver. “Yes?” she said. Then: “Yes.” She listened for a time, started to exclaim, was evidently cut off by the person at the other end of the line. “Can you wait a moment? ” she asked. They heard her set the receiver down carefully on a wooden shelf. When she entered the living room she was holding both hands lightly to the sides of her face.
“Julius, darling, do we have money in the house?” She spoke calmly, as though drawing on a reserve of inner strength, but her hands were trembling and her cheeks were flushed.
“Who is it?”
“This is Natalya. Calling on the telephone to say that she must return to Poland. Tonight.”
“Why would she …?”
“It has been ordered, Julius. The police are there and she is to be put on a train after midnight. They are being very polite about it, she says, and are willing to bring her here on the way to the station.”
Baumann did not react; he stared.
“Julius?” Frau Baumann said. “Natalya is waiting to see if we can help her.”
“In the drawer,” Baumann said. He turned to Szara. “Natalya is her cousin. She came here from Lublin six years ago.”
“There isn’t very much in the drawer,” Frau Baumann said.
Szara took a thick handful of reichsmarks out of his pocket. “Give her this,” he said, handing it to Baumann.
Frau Baumann returned to the telephone. “Yes, it’s all right. When are you coming?” She paused for the answer. “Good, then we’ll see you. I’m sure it will be straightened out. Don’t forget your sweaters, Polish hotels … Yes … I know … Twenty minutes.” She hung up the phone and returned to the living room. “All the Jewish immigrants from Poland must leave Germany,” she said. “They are being deported.”
“Deported?” Baumann said.