by Alan Furst
Of course the system varied with the national point of view. Low-level agents for the French were called dupeurs, deceivers, and principally reported on the military institutions of various countries. Moutons, sheep, went after industrial intelligence while baladeurs, strolling players, took on free-lance assignments. The French equivalent of the proniknoveniya, highly controlled and highly placed, was the agent fixe, while the trafiquant, like Tscherova, handled a net of subagents.
At the corner of Kraussenstrasse Szara paused, studied the street signs, then hurried across the intersection, not running exactly, but managing in such a way that two speeding Daimlers went whizzing past his back. A tobacconist’s shop window, briefly inspected, revealed his company peering anxiously from the other side of the street, then crossing behind him. Szara quickened his pace slightly, then trotted up the steps of the Hotel Kempinski, passed through the elegant lobby, then seated himself at a table in the hotel bar. This was sophisticated Berlin; a study in glossy black and white surfaces with chrome highlights, palm trees, a man in a white tuxedo playing romantic songs on a white piano, a scattering of well-dressed people, and the soothing, melodic hum of conversation. He ordered a schnapps, leaned back in a leather chair, and focused his attention on a woman who was alone at a nearby table-rather ageless, not unattractive, very much minding her own business; which was a tall drink with a miniature candy cane hung on the side of the glass.
Ten minutes later, company arrived. Sweaty, moon-faced, anxious; an overworked detective who’d evidently parked himself on a chair in the lobby, then got nervous being out of contact with his assignment. He stood at the bar, ordered a beer, counted out pocket change to pay for it. Szara felt sorry for him.
Meanwhile, the woman he’d picked out made steady progress with her drink. Szara walked over to her and, presenting his back to the detective, leaned over and asked her what time it was. She said, politely enough, that she didn’t know, but thought it was getting on toward ten. Szara laughed, stood up, turned halfway back toward his table, thought better of it, looked at his watch, said something like “I’m afraid my watch has stopped” in a low voice, smiled con-spiratorially, then returned to his chair. Fifteen minutes later, she left. Szara checked his watch, gave her five minutes to get wherever she was going, then threw a bill on the table and departed. Out in the lobby, he hurried onto an elevator just before the door closed and asked to be let off at the fourth floor. He walked purposefully down the hall, heard the door close behind him, then found a stairway and returned to the lobby. The detective was sitting in a chair, watching the elevator door like a hawk, waiting for Szara to return from his assignation. Szara left the hotel through a side entrance, made certain he had no further company, then hailed a cab.
Rosenhain Passage was medieval, a crooked lane surfaced with broken stone. Half-timbered buildings, the plaster gray with age, slanted backward as they rose, and a cold smell of drains hung in the dead air. What had happened here? He heard water trickling from unmended pipes, all shutters were closed tight, the street was lifeless, inert. There were no people. In the middle of all this stood Das Schmuckkastchen-the Jewel Box-theater, as though a city cultural commission had been told to do something about Rosenhain Passage and here was their solution, a way of brightening things up. A hand-painted banner hung from the handle of an old-fashioned coach horn announcing the performance of The Captain’s Dilemma by Hans-Peter Mutchler.
Midway down an alley next to the theater, a door had been propped open with a pressing iron. Szara shoved it out of the way with his foot, let the door close gently until the lock snapped. Behind a thick curtain he could hear a play in progress, a man and a woman exchanging domestic insults in the declamatory style reserved for historical drama-listen carefully, this was written a long time ago. The insults were supposed to be amusing, the thrust of the voice told you that, and someone in the theater did laugh once, but Szara could feel the almost palpable discomfort-the shifting and coughing, the unvoiced sigh-of an audience subjected to a witless and boring evening.
As Goldman had promised, there wasn’t a soul to be seen where he entered. He peered through the darkness, found a row of doors, and tapped lightly at the one marked C.
“Yes? Come in.”
He found himself in a small dressing room: mirrors, costumes, clutter. A woman with a book in her hand, place held with an index finger, was sitting upright on a chaise longue, her face taut and anxious. Goldman had shown him a photograph. An actress. But the reality left him staring. Perhaps it was Berlin, the grotesque weight of the place, its heavy air, thickly made people, the brutal density of its life, but the woman seemed to him almost transparent, someone who might float away at any moment.
She put her head to one side and studied him clinically. “You’re different,” she said in Russian. Her voice was hoarse, and even in two words he could hear contempt.
“Different? “
“They usually send me a sort of boar. With bristles.” She was tall and slight, had turned up the cuffs of a thick sweater to reveal delicate wrists. Her eyes were enormous, a blue so pale and fragile it reminded him of blindness, and her hair, worn long and loose, was the color of an almond shell. It was very fine hair, the kind that stirred with the slightest motion. Also she had been drinking; he could smell wine. “Sit down,” she said softly, changing moods.
He sat in a thronelike armchair, clearly a stage prop. “Are you in the play?” She was wearing slacks and strapped shoes with low heels, the outfit didn’t go with the old-fashioned bluster he could hear from the stage.
“Done for the night.” Her voice easily suggested quotation marks when she added, “Beatrice, a maid.” She shrugged, a dismissive Russian gesture. “It’s my rotten German. Sometimes I play a foreigner, but mostly it’s maids. In little maid costumes. Everybody likes little maid costumes. When I bend over you can almost see my ass. But not quite.”
“What play is it?”
“What? You don’t know The Captain’s Dilemma? I thought everybody did.”
“No. Sorry.”
“Mutchler suits the current taste-that is, Goebbels’s taste. He’s said to consider it quite excellent. The captain returns to his home ten years after a shipwreck; he finds his wife living beyond her means, a slave to foolish fashion, beset by sycophants and usurers. He, on the other hand, is a typical Volk: sturdy, forthright, honest, a simple man from Rostock with the pleasures of a simple man. Simple pleasures, you see-we play him as a turnip. So now we have conflict, and a kind of drawing room comedy, with all sorts of amusing character parts: hypocrites, fops, oily Jews.”
“And the dilemma? “
“The dilemma is why the playwright wasn’t strangled at birth.”
Szara laughed.
“What are you? A writer? I mean beside the other thing.”
“How do you know I’m the other thing? “
“Cruel times for Nadia if you’re not.”
“And why a writer? “
“Oh, I know writers. I have them in my family, or used to. Do you want some wine? Be careful-it’s a test.”
“Just a little.”
“You fail.” She reached behind a screen, poured wine into a water glass, and handed it to him, then retrieved her own glass, hidden behind a leg of the chaise longue. “Nazhdrov’ya.”
“Nazhdrov’ya.”
“Phooey.” She wrinkled her nose at the glass. “Your pretty little niece, who is no doubt dying to be an actress-tell her it all rests on a tolerance for atrocious white wine.”
“You are from Moscow?” he asked.
“No, Piter, St. Petersburg. So sorry, I mean Leningrad. An old, old family. Tscherova is my married name.”
“And Tscherov? He’s in Berlin?”
“Pfft,” she said, casting her eyes up at the ceiling and springing four fingers from beneath her thumb, flicking Tscherov’s soul up to heaven. “November 1917.”
“Difficult times,” he said in sympathy.
“A Menshevik,
a nice man. Married me when I was sixteen and didn’t I give him a hellish time of it. The last eight months of his life, too. Poor Tscherov.” Her eyes shone for a moment and she looked away.
“At least you survived.”
“We all did. Aristocrats and artists in my family, all crazy as bats; revolution was the very thing for us. I have a brother in your business. Or I should say had. He seems to have vanished. Sascha.” She laughed at his memory, a harsh cackle, then put her fingers to her mouth, as though it were a drunken sound and embarrassed her. “Sorry. Colonel Alexander Vonets-did you know him?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Charming bastard. Ah, the elegant Vonets family- but see what they’ve come to now. Miserable stukachi, dealing in filthy Nazi gossip. ‘Oh, but my dear General, how absolutely fasss-cinating!’ ” She snickered at her own performance, then leaned toward him. “You know what they say in Paris, that a woman attending a soiree needs only two words of French to be thought an elegant conversationalist? formidable and fantastique. Well, it’s the same here. You look up at them-you sit down if they’re squatty little things; the eyes simply must look up at them-and they talk and talk, and you say-in German of course-formidable! after one sentence and fantastique! after the next. ‘Brilliant woman!’ they say later.”
“So it’s all nothing more than conversation.”
She studied him for a moment. “You are very rude,” she said.
“Forgive me. It’s just curiosity. I don’t care what you do.”
“Well, as I’m certain you know, this wasn’t my idea.”
“No?”
“Hardly. When they discovered I’d snuck out of Russia and was in Berlin, they sent some people, not like you, around.” She shrugged, remembering the moment. “Offered a choice between death and money, I chose money.”
Szara nodded in sympathy.
“We go to … parties, my little troupe and I. Parties of a sort, you know. We’re considered a terrific amount of fun. People drink. Lose their inhibitions. Shall you hear it all?”
“Of course not.”
She smiled. “It isn’t so bad as you think. I avoid the worst of it, but my associates, well. Not that I’m innocent, you understand. I’ve known a couple of them better than I should have.” She paused. Looked at him critically, closed one eye. “You must be a writer-so serious. Everything means something, but we … In the theater, you know, we’re like naughty children, like brothers and sisters playing behind the shed. So these things don’t mean so much, it’s a way to forget yourself, that’s all. One night you’re this person and the next night you’re that person, so that sometimes you’re no person at all. This profession … it deforms the heart. Perhaps. I don’t know.”
She was lost for a moment, sitting on the edge of the chaise, weight borne by elbows on knees, glass held in both hands. “As for the Nazis, well, they’re really more like pigs than humans, if you think about it. The men-and the women-just like pigs, they even squeal like pigs. It’s no insult to say this, it’s literal. It isn’t their ‘Schweine!’ that I’m talking about but real pigs: pink, overweight, quite intelligent if you know anything about them, certainly smarter than dogs, but very appetitious, there the common wisdom has it just right. They do want what they want, and lots of it, and right away, and then, when they get it, they’re happy. Blissful.”
“I thought you said the man who came to see you was like a boar.”
“I did say that, didn’t I. I’m sure there’s a difference, though. You just have to be much smarter than me to see it.”
From the stage Szara could hear the ringing tones of a soliloquy, a kind of triumphant anger shot through with blistering rectitude. Then a pause, then desultory applause, then the creak of an unoiled mechanism closing the curtain. This was followed by a heavy tread in the hallway, a man’s gruff voice, “Scheiss!” and the emphatic slam of a door.
“There,” said Tscherova, switching into German, “that’s the captain now. A simple Volk.”
Szara reached into his pockets and withdrew the thick wads of reichsmarks. She nodded, took them from him, stood, and stuffed the pockets of a long wool coat hanging on a peg.
Szara now assumed their conversation to be perfectly audible to the “captain” next door. “You’ll take care of your, ah, health. I really hope you will.”
“Oh yes.”
He stood in order to leave; in the small room they were a little closer together than strangers would normally have been. “It’s better,” he said quietly, “not to find out how it would be. Yes?”
She smiled impishly, amused that the proximity affected him. “You are different, you are. And you mustn’t be too concerned.” Her slim hand brushed the waistband of her slacks, then held up a tiny vial of yellow liquid. Her eyebrow lifted, see how clever? “End of story,” she said. “Curtain.” Then she hid it behind her back, as though it didn’t exist. She bent toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth-very warm and very brief-and whispered good-bye, in Russian, next to his ear.
Szara walked east from the theater, away from the Adlon, unconsciously following procedure. Balked by the Neu-Kolln Canal, he veered south to Gertraudten Bridge, lit a cigarette, watched orange peels and scrapwood drifting past on the black water. It was colder, the lamp lights had pale halos as mist drifted off the canal.
The Directorate never knew their agents in person; Szara now saw the reason for that. Tscherova’s vulnerability would not leave his mind. Caught between the Gestapo and the NKVD, between Germany and Russia, she lived by her wits, by looking as she did, by clever talk. But she would have to drink the yellow liquid eventually, maybe soon, and the idea of so much life-all the emotional weather that blew across her heart-winding up as a formless shape collapsed in a corner tormented him. Could a woman be too beautiful to die? Moscow wouldn’t like his answer to that. Was he a little bit in love with her? What if he was. Was all her capering about, the way she worked on him with her eyes, meant to draw him to her? He was sure of it. How could that be wrong?
She’d have to drink the liquid because agents didn’t survive. The result of all the elaborate defenses, secrecy and codes and clandestine methods of every sort, was time gained, only that, against a known destiny. Things went wrong. Things always, eventually, went wrong. The world was unpredictable, inconsistent, volatile, ultimately a madhouse of bizarre events. Agents got caught. Almost always. You replaced them. That’s what the apparat expected you to do: reorganize the chaos, mend the damage, and go on. There were ways in which he accepted that, but when women entered the equation he failed. His need was to protect women, not to sacrifice them, and he could not, would not, change. An ancient instinct, to stand between women and danger, sapped his will to run operations the way they had to be run and made him a bad intelligence officer-it was just that simple. And the worst part of it was that the yellow liquid wasn’t part of some spy kit-the NKVD didn’t believe in such things. No, Tscherova had obtained the liquid herself, because she knew what happened to agents just as well as he did and she wanted to have it over and done with when the time came. The idea made him ill, the world couldn’t go on that way.
But they had a Jew up on the end of Bruderstrasse, where Szara turned north, a pack of drunken Hitlerjugend in their fancy uniforms, teenagers, forcing some poor soul on hands and knees to drink the black water in a gutter, and they were shouting and laughing and singing and having a tremendously good time at it.
Szara faded into a doorway. For a moment he thought he was having a stroke-his vision swam and a terrible force hammered against his temples like a fist. Steadying himself against a wall, he realized it wasn’t a stroke, it was rage, and he fought to subdue it. For a moment he went mad, shutting his eyes against the pounding blood and pleading with God for a machine gun, a hand grenade, a pistol, any weapon at all-but this prayer was not immediately answered. Later he discovered a small chip missing from a front tooth. Some time after midnight, having crept away into the darkness, walking through deserted s
treets toward his hotel, he made the inevitable connection: Tscherova, by what she did, could help to destroy these people, these youths with their Jewish toy. She could weaken them in ways they did not understand, she was more than a machine gun or a pistol, a far deadlier weapon than any he’d wished for. The knowledge tore at him, on top of what he’d seen, and there were tears on his face that he wiped off with the sleeve of his raincoat.
The following afternoon, he told Marta Haecht what he’d seen. Instinctively she reached for him, but when her hands flew to touch him he no more than allowed it, unwilling to reject an act of love, but equally unwilling to be comforted.
This was pain he meant to keep.
To maintain his cover, he had to write something.
“Nothing political,” Goldman had warned. “Let Tass file on diplomatic developments; you find yourself something meaningless, filler. Just pretend that some ambitious editor has taken it into his head that Pravda’s view on Germany needs the Szara touch. Even with all the bad blood and political hostility, life goes on. A bad job but you’re making the best of it; you want to lead the Reich press office to believe that, a little of their fine Teutonic contempt is the very thing for you. For the moment, let them sneer.”
Midmorning, in the dining room at the Adlon, Szara submitted himself to the tender mercies of Vainshtok. The little man ran his fingers through his hair and studied his list of possible stories. “A Szara needs help from a Vainshtok?” he said. “I knew the world was turning upside down, Armageddon expected any day now, but this!”
“What have you got?” Szara said. He caught the attention of a passing waiter: “A Linzer torte for my friend, plenty of schlag on it.”